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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1824 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Surely, if she has such a strong knowledge of the Act and such a strong grasp of the requirements for appropriations - or, as she puts it, authorisations - she should have known all about the legality or otherwise of the illegal expenditure at Bruce. After all, that is her job. That is why we pay her. That is what we expect her to do. Mr Speaker, clearly she did know but she does not want to admit it. She knew, because she continued to produce excuses for the illegal expenditure, excuses which were found one by one to be flawed and to be wrong.

If the Chief Minister was so confident that her actions over expenditure at Bruce were legal, that they were allowed, that they were not unusual, that $25m was being spent legally, then why did each of the excuses that the Government has put forward fall over one by one? Why indeed were they abandoned by the Government one by one? As my colleague Mr Stanhope has pointed out, we have had a range of excuses put forward over the past month to justify their actions. We have had the net appropriations defence, and we have had a range of other defences. All of them have been shown to be without any foundation. Mr Speaker, these defences fell over and were abandoned by the Chief Minister because something wrong had occurred. Money had been spent without an appropriation. When you attempt to justify it in a way which is not true, it is usually revealed as just that. That is what has happened here.

Let us go quickly over one of these defences. The Chief Minister claimed that it was a cash management issue, but that did not last. Only later did she claim that the expenditure was authorised under the terms of an investment under section 38 of the Financial Management Act. But it is interesting to note the time when the Government introduced the defence of an investment. They introduced this defence after the Government had sought legal advice from Mr Tracey on behalf of the Auditor-General. They did not ask it up front; they did not ask the Auditor-General up front for his opinion on the Government's actions. They asked him to give his opinion on the investment issue after they had asked him to give an opinion on the range of other issues that the Auditor-General had asked for information about.

Why on earth would they do that? Members only have to read the legal advice and associated documents provided by Mr Tracey to realise that the Government sought to introduce the investment issue late in the day - indeed, after the Auditor-General had sent his request for advice. If the Government had been acting consistently, as they say they have been, and if the Government had been acting openly on this issue, as they say they had been, then surely the investment issue, the use of section 38 of the Financial Management Act, would have been used up front at the beginning. If there was nothing to hide, if they were acting normally, why did they not use that defence at the beginning? They did not use it at the beginning. It is because they did not use it at the beginning that members of this place can draw only one conclusion, and that is that the Government endeavoured to conceal what had occurred.

Mr Speaker, they used other excuses, and after they failed they eventually found the loophole that they needed to justify their actions - the investment loophole. The Chief Minister found the loophole she needed to justify her actions. Mrs Carnell knew she was responsible for the illegal action of her Government. She attempted to excuse it away as cash management but failed in that. She attempted to excuse it away as net appropriation but failed in that. She resorted to the investment excuse late in the day.

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