Page 632 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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MR STEVENSON: I have just spent a fair bit of time doing it in detail, and I picked them up one at a time; but let me do it again - not on the whole thing, just on a couple of points. One is the bona fides of directors. Mr Berry said that they had been checked out. They had not been checked out. The next point is that there was little or no competition, when Mr Berry suggested that there was a great deal of it. Mr Berry said that it was safe for the ACT. The truth of the matter is, as we now know absolutely, that it was not safe for the ACT. I mentioned that the mere fact that we entered into an agreement with an offshore company made it unsafe for the ACT. Whether or not it panned out, that still made it unsafe. Even if it finally worked there was danger there. The next point is that Mr Berry did not tell us about VicTAB when he could have. He suggests that the VicTAB deal was not connected with the Vanuatu deal, but that is drawing a longbow. One would suggest that they are intimately connected - it might be like saying that your rear wheels have nothing to do with your front wheels - because they rely upon each other.
I am happy to mention those key points that I looked at. Even if Mr Berry considered that there were commercial interests that would have been jeopardised by going public and telling people in Canberra, telling members of the Assembly and answering questions, there were other avenues that he chose not to take. He did not come along to us and ask us not to go public with vital matters. There is no doubt that it was going to come out in the long run. No-one could suggest that Mr Berry intended to hide this information. The situation was only ever postponed. In that regard he has a point. He could have talked to other members in this Assembly, and I am interested to know why he did not.
MR MOORE (9.53): Madam Speaker, with 17 members in the Assembly, a situation such as this is invariably difficult. It is a responsibility we have to face. We are all conscious of the fact that we work very closely with each other. If the outcome tonight is that Mr Berry loses his portfolio, we are conscious that we are then going to have to work with him on committees, for example, and that we will continue working closely. I think in many ways that makes the responsibility we have before us much more difficult than it is in other parliaments.
One of the most important parts of this motion is that it deals not just with deliberate misleading of the Assembly but also with reckless misleading of the Assembly. It is not good enough, when we are talking about a reckless misleading, to say, "I did not know". It is not good enough to say, "Well, that was my advice". It is not good enough, Mr Stevenson, that something was done in an inadvertent manner when there was a responsibility to know. It is not good enough when somebody is working just on the advice of their own advisers when they had a responsibility to know. That would be reckless.
This motion, which takes its form from the work Gary Humphries had done on that Senate inquiry - I think the word "reckless" came from the Senate inquiry - is something we have to consider very carefully. I would like, first of all, to talk about the inquiry, which was the subject of the addresses by the three Ministers other than Mr Berry, all of whom argued that because we have an inquiry we ought not to be addressing this issue now. If we allowed ourselves to be swayed by that argument, it seems to me that an
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