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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1492 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: I will be as brief as I can, but there are a number of things I simply have to respond to. First of all, I want to respond to a number of outrageous allegations made by various people in this debate. It was suggested that members of my office saw

Mr Bender's statutory declaration before it was tabled on the floor of the Assembly today. That is untrue.

A statement was made - in fact, it was not a statement; it was a sly suggestion advanced in a sideways motion by those opposite - that the reason that the three statements put on the table today were not sworn is that the people who made those statements had some lack of truthfulness in doing so and did not wish to be exposed for doing that. I have asked Ms X, and Ms X has agreed readily, to have her statement executed as a statutory declaration. She will have that put on the table today. So the grubby little statements that are being made about her truthfulness can be addressed fully in that way. The reason that that and other statements were not executed in the form of statutory declarations is that they were executed late last night, around 10 o'clock, when JPs and the like were hard to come by.

I want to make a few points on a few other arguments. We have had the suggestion from various people that the series of events adds up to too much of a smell of something wrong to ignore. We have had considerable focus on the statutory declarations and the contents of those statutory declarations and the statements that have been tabled here today to try to establish who said what at the meetings between the Bender family and other people who came to their home. I do not know what was said in those conversations in the home of Mr and Mrs Bender in Fisher. I do not have a clue, because I was not present.

That, of course, is the point. None of us in this chamber were present at those meetings. None of the statements, no matter how much variation you find in them and in no matter how many ways you look at them - backwards and forwards, up and down, left and right - even the most damning of the statements from the point of view of those opposite, establish any connection between my conduct in this matter and the statements and the allegations that have been made by those opposite.

In almost as many words they have alleged I sent Ms X to the Benders' home to somehow scuttle Mr Collaery's advocacy on their behalf. Nowhere in any of the documents is that statement made. Ms Tucker and Mr Kaine can look at different angles and ask, "Was this said or not? Did Ms X make this statement or not?". I do not know and in some respects, for the purpose of this debate, I do not care. Even if she did make those statements, I was not present to make them and I did not send her to make them.

The entire point of this exercise - to connect me, the Attorney-General, to the content of those statements - fails utterly. Not one shred of evidence has been advanced to that effect. It is disgraceful that five hours of debate on the floor of this place have been devoted to this nonsense when there was no evidence to support that.

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