Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 1493 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I speak now, seeing on the floor only Mr Stanhope and Mr Berry of those who are going to support this motion. The rats, you might say, have left the sinking, or maybe the stinking, ship in this debate. That is what this case is - a stinking ship, a ship without foundation. Mr Kaine criticised Mr Rugendyke for not listening and Mr Osborne for not even being present. Where is Mr Kaine now? Where is Ms Tucker? Ms Tucker's case was the most appalling that I have heard. It is good to know you are out there, Mr Kaine, but come in and face the heat. Come in to where we can see the red rising in your face rather than being outside, where you can escape the slings and arrows of this debate.

I will not say anything about Mr Kaine except this: Mr Kaine asked me about bias in writing the letter to the Law Society about Mr Collaery. I ask Mr Kaine to examine his conscience about the bias he has brought to this debate and the bias in introducing the matter to the Assembly yesterday by happening to have documents ready which happened to get tabled on request from the ALP. I ask him to examine what axes he has been grinding since May 1993 and whether this is all about those axes trying to fall on some people's heads.

Ms Tucker advanced the weakest and the most disgusting arguments of all in this debate. It astonishes me that a person who has been elected to this place could so disregard the evidence put forward that she would choose to take this approach. I detected from Ms Tucker that she was not satisfied with any of the evidence about the so-called conversations in the Benders' household. I do not think, to give her her due, that she found that any of it established any link with me at all.

Ms Tucker said that she was convinced that I should experience a motion of want of confidence in me at the point where I said that, hypothetically, had I been asked for my opinion about Mr Collaery, I would have expressed it. If I can get this correct, Ms Tucker says that I deserve to be sacked as Attorney-General of the ACT because in a hypothetical situation I would have taken a particular view. That is a pretty impressive piece of logic, one that leaves me gasping for air.

Mr Osborne asked me to comment on why there was a delay between the issues raised by Mr Collaery's conduct in the media on the criminal injuries compensation reforms and the sending of the letter to the Law Society. It was always my intention not to write a letter in anger in those circumstances. Members in this place have been quick to make the point that this is about a vendetta, about getting back at somebody. It was my belief that writing a letter in anger in response to those issues in the media would have been more easily characterised as that.

I wanted to make it clear to the Law Society that my intention was to exercise my right as Attorney-General to be able to draw attention to what I considered to be inappropriate conduct by a solicitor of this city and that that was the basis for my writing that letter and not the fact that Mr Collaery and I have had an unhappy relationship in the past. I, of course, cannot prove that that was my motivation for writing the letter, but I put it to this place today that it is not up to me to prove that that was the reason I wrote the letter. It is up to those people who have moved in this place that I should be dismissed from my office to prove that I had that motivation in this matter. They, of course, have not done so.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .