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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1803 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Persons who deliberately set out to break the law cannot expect to be aided in a court of justice, but it is a different matter when the law is unwittingly broken.

Let me repeat that last part in case anyone missed it, Mr Speaker:

That is a very interesting point, Mr Speaker, because that eminent judge tells us that, if the law is broken unwittingly or inadvertently, then it is quite different from a deliberate act to consciously break the law. We also have definitions of "intent" in the dictionaries - the normal, everyday meaning of intent. I picked up the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary, Third Edition, and found "intent" defined there as:

Those opposite might well say that the Chief Minister was firmly fixed on a particular outcome in relation to the Bruce project. Quite clearly, the Government was fixed on building a good stadium and was intending to build a good stadium. But in doing that did the Chief Minister set out deliberately to break the law? Did any public servant set out to break the law? Did any member of the then Cabinet, including our former colleague Mr Kaine, set out to break the law? Of course not. There has been no evidence produced today to back up such an allegation. Was a mistake made? No doubt. Mrs Carnell has already apologised to the Assembly and to the people of Canberra. Mistakes do happen, Mr Speaker.

Mr Moore: With 20,000 public servants, you will get mistakes.

MR STEFANIAK: Exactly. For the benefit of the Assembly, let me share with members what another prominent politician recently had to say about mistakes being committed by Ministers and governments. On 25 February, this politician told ABC radio:

I repeat what he said:

Guess who that was? No, it was not one of our colleagues here. The person was, in fact, Simon Crean, deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party. It is a comment that is particularly applicable to this situation, because the mistake made by the Government here was inadvertent and it was unintentional. These kinds of mistakes, as we have heard, have occurred across every government in every jurisdiction in Australia and probably around the world. Because we are human, they will probably continue to occur in the future, regardless of who is in government.

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