Page 573 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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We come to the question of deliberate or reckless misleading. I am prepared to accept that the Minister has recklessly misled the Assembly; that the misleading is not deliberate. He has recklessly misled us, because he did not know what he was doing and therefore has failed to understand what he has got himself into. Despite constant questioning by the Opposition, he has failed to understand what he has got himself into. The Chief Minister says, "Well, everything is all right now because we have an inquiry". Why do we have an inquiry? We have an inquiry only because the Chief Minister started to feel that heat on the belly that Mr Berry keeps talking about. But where did that heat come from? It came from questions consistently raised by the Opposition - a legitimate process to establish the credentials of the Minister and the bona fides of the Government.
When you come to misleading, you can mislead either by commission or by omission. You can tell an untruth or you can fail to disclose something, and the Minister is guilty of both. The first part - the misleading by commission - has been amply demonstrated already. Mr Berry talked about the directors, and he did not tell us the truth. He told us that this was a public company, when it was a private company. There is a whole list of things that have been dealt with already. But it is the things that he has not told us that have worried me just as much. One of those has been dealt with already. That is the question: When did VicTAB tell us, "You are out."? Why did he not come and tell us when that was the case?
I am quite sure that as we go more and more deeply into this we will discover that there are other matters. But it is the attitude of the Minister and his Government on this matter that bothers me. When you go back through some of the documentation, the first thing that we find out is that on about 27 January this year VITAB, in response to a question, said that they opposed the release of any information whatsoever in regard to VITAB Ltd and a whole range of other things. They were opposed to the release of any information whatsoever. One could ask why. Why did VITAB not want this Assembly and the community in general to know what sort of an organisation Mr Berry had got into a contract with? That is the first question. But the second interesting question is that the Minister swallowed that. Here we have a $2 company registered in Vanuatu, and it says to these elected members of the Assembly, "You cannot even tell the other members of the Assembly anything about us, not one thing", and the Minister buys that. That is consistent with the Minister's approach. Questioning consistently over a period of months has elicited nothing from this Minister. He has flatly refused to answer questions, or he has answered them incompletely, or he has left out a lot of the answer that he should have given. We have had this constant deception.
The exhortation which the Minister accepted without question not to reveal one single thing about VITAB is only part of the story. Later on in the documentation we discover that the Minister was advised by one of his officers on 25 February that he should not make documents available under FOI. And why should they not be made available? Because in one particular case:
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