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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 774 ..

Mr Moore: You are not good on numbers.

MR KAINE: I am not too good on numbers. We have heard a certain amount of emotion and you can understand why the Opposition might be out for blood. They are seeking to make a political point and are not too concerned about the facts of the case. The facts are quite simple and we did not need an hour-and-a-quarter or so of debate so far to try to establish them.

When we are talking about misrepresenting, the Leader of the Opposition said in his opening remarks, "The reason why this report is before the house is that we, the Labor Party, did not believe what the Government said when they were negotiating the VMOs dispute". That is simply not the case. This report is before this Assembly because the Public Accounts Committee asked for it - not Mr Whitecross, not even the then Leader of the Opposition, Rosemary Follett. The Public Accounts Committee asked for it because there had been a previous report on this subject back in 1993. The Public Accounts Committee, of its own volition, had taken on a reference to look again at the subject. In view of the renegotiation of the contracts, we felt that it was the responsibility of the Auditor-General to review what he had said two years before. The Leader of the Opposition comes in here and misrepresents; yet he expects to be believed when he says that the Chief Minister is misrepresenting. The facts are clear.

Let us look at the allegations made in this motion. You people are asked to vote on a motion that says that the Chief Minister recklessly misled the house. If the Chief Minister had had advice from her officials that she set aside and said, "I do not believe that", and came in here and made comments, she could be accused of recklessly misleading the house. If before now it had been brought to her attention that the expected savings from the VMOs' arrangements were not delivering the goods and she still came in here and said that the situation was other than what it is, she could be charged with recklessly misleading the house. She has done neither of those things.

The crux of this matter, in my view, is very simple. It is the question of whether or not the Chief Minister was entitled to rely on the information that was put to her by her officials, using the very model that Mr Berry now disputes as being valid. He did not know until yesterday that it was invalid. It was as a result of the Auditor-General looking at it, at the request of the Public Accounts Committee, that he now has evidence to suggest that it may not be valid. We can rely on the Auditor-General's report for this because on page 18 he says this:

The actual implementation of the contract arrangements -

the ones that are now in place with the VMOs -

was negotiated by two governments before the final arrangement was put in place.

In other words, Mr Connolly was negotiating, using the very same information and the very same model that the Chief Minister continued to use after she became Minister for Health a year ago. If it was unreliable and therefore the Chief Minister was misleading, except for the strange quirk of fate that a year ago the government changed,

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