Page 561 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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... I asked that advice be sought ...
... I was given the necessary assurances ...
I am advised that the results ...
I am advised that ...
I understand that ACTTAB and its solicitors are currently ...
I am advised by ACTTAB ...
In the space of one page you qualified your statements on this VITAB affair more often than you did in the whole year. You knew, Mr Berry, when you made those statements, that something had gone wrong, very badly wrong, and you were distancing yourself as hard and as fast as you could from the decisions that had been made, apparently by ACTTAB but in fact by you, the Minister directly, totally and absolutely responsible for the activities of ACTTAB. Nobody else is responsible, as Mr De Domenico has indicated, but you. You, Minister, took on the responsibility when you decorporatised ACTTAB. You were the Minister who would be held responsible for the successes and the failures of ACTTAB. You were prepared, in November and December of last year, to take all of the credit for this big deal that you had done with VITAB. You must now, Minister, take all of the responsibility for the failure of this deal. You appear to be the only person in the ACT who still will not acknowledge that VITAB has failed this Territory very badly.
I want to turn to some things that Ms Follett said in this place. She said that we have to look very closely at the questions that were asked of the Minister; we have to put them in context. The Minister never specifically said, says Ms Follett, that the ACTTAB-VicTAB deal was safe. No, no, no; he was referring only to other specific issues. I quote once more the phrase that Mr Berry used on 1 March:
... it -
that is the VITAB deal -
is safe for the ACT.
Safe for the ACT, not for VITAB; not even just for ACTTAB, but safe for the ACT. Was that taken out of context? I do not think so.
The Minister, according to Ms Follett, was never asked about the safety of the Victorian TAB-ACTTAB link. She must have a different Hansard from mine, because my Hansard for 8 December 1993 has this question from Mrs Carnell to Mr Berry:
My question without notice is to the Deputy Chief Minister in his capacity as Minister for Sport. I refer the Minister to a meeting of senior executives of TABs from around Australia in Sydney on Monday, 6 December. Is it true that the ACTTAB was advised at the
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