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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (25 August) . . Page.. 1212 ..

MR SPEAKER: Mr Stanhope, do you want to table papers?

MR STANHOPE: I do.

Leave granted.

MS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (11.21): Mr Speaker, in all of that, four extensions and whatever, Mr Stanhope could not quote one brief to government, to Mr Humphries or to me, or to anybody else prior to the preliminary agreement being entered into, and I thought that was what this was all about.

I will start from the beginning. Mr Stanhope started by saying that anybody can confuse "block" and "lease". "I have done it", he said. So, that is not the issue. We will rule a line through that because Mr Stanhope himself has agreed that anybody can do that. So he agrees that substituting "block" and "lease" is not a heinous crime. In fact, it is something that he personally has done. So we will rule that out to start with.

Mr Stanhope then used documents that the Government gave him, not ones that have been leaked or that he got in any other wonderful way. It was absolutely open, absolutely honest.

Mr Stanhope: We got them under the FOI Act. You had to give them.

MS CARNELL: Obviously, FOI. Anyway. He used documents that the Government gave him and then proceeded to quote them, somewhat out of order, certainly selectively. I have to say you would have to be fairly clever to work out what he was even talking about, Mr Speaker. If Mr Stanhope is suggesting that the Government did know prior to the preliminary agreement being signed in December that Mr Whitcombe was not bringing the whole of the Bolton farm or Hillview to the table, why did the map that was attached to the preliminary agreement show the whole of the Hillview area, and the whole of Kinlyside, I have to say? Why would that be the case? If Mr Whitcombe, as they say opposite, is not a liar - and I do not believe he is; I still have absolute faith in Mr Whitcombe - why would Mr Whitcombe bring to a preliminary agreement a map of the whole of the Bolton farm?

Mr Speaker, I think one of the documents that Mr Stanhope quoted from was from the Hall/Kinlyside Rural Estate Project Control Group, the minutes of meeting No. 2 on 18 May. Unfortunately he did not quote them appropriately and he spoke about Ms Pegrum. I will quote from agenda item No. 4, New Business, and I will quote it in total. It says:

Discussions centred on the leases held over the Bolton property. The preliminary agreement was based upon Derek Whitcombe bringing the whole of the Hillview property to the venture.

Mr Speaker, I will quote that again because that is what this is about. This was on 18 May. The project control group minutes say this:

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