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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (25 August) . . Page.. 1203 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

Mr Corbell asked what the evidence was, and the following exchange occurred:

MR LILLEY: The actual leases were brought in.

MR CORBELL: How many leases?

MR LILLEY: Three.

MR CORBELL: He provided you with three lease documents?

MR LILLEY: Yes.

MR CORBELL: He did?

MR LILLEY: Yes.

MR CORBELL: Are you sure?

MR LILLEY: Absolutely.

MR CORBELL: Are you able to provide us with copies of these documents?

MR LILLEY: No, they were the original leases and we returned them obviously.

The discussion went on and on and on, and at times Mrs Carnell interjected with comments such as: "The three leases - they certainly exist". There were interjections from Ms Ford along the same line. When we asked for the leases to be tabled, when we asked for the Government to go to the Titles Office and get their copies of the three leases, of course mayhem, absolute panic. The very next day Mrs Carnell wrote to members apologising for inadvertently misleading us as a result of her confusion over the words "block" and "lease". You can say what you like about the obvious confusion that will exist about "blocks" and "leases", but the bottom line is that the documents do not exist. If there are any journalists listening who want some proof of it, I would suggest they ring perhaps Mr Whitcombe. Mr Lilley insists that Mr Whitcombe has the documents. The Titles Office does not have them. The Titles Office did not provide them to us through estimates when requested. They did not provide them to us through FOI, because they do not exist. There is no such thing, even if you were confused about leases and blocks. You can have three sets of lease documents - that is possible - but you cannot have three sets of block documents. There is no such thing as a block document. What do we have in this case? In the documents provided to us by the Government there are three sets of documents. There is a lease with two documents attached which actually extract two blocks of land from the lease.

Ms Carnell: How many documents were there?

MR STANHOPE: There are three.

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