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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1839 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

When the Government's unlawful activities finally did begin to come to light, when a few people started asking a few questions and when the Auditor-General raised the question about the appropriateness of the $9.7m loan, Mrs Carnell started to come up with this series of increasingly incredible excuses that we have heard about all the afternoon. "It was all okay", said the Chief Minister, "because the Cabinet endorsed it".

Mrs Carnell knows that Cabinets endorse lots of things, but, when the Minister in that Cabinet goes out and implements those Cabinet decisions, it is the expectation of every other member of the Cabinet, and of the public, that they will be implemented within the law. Did Mr Humphries and Mr Stefaniak expect, when they sat in that Cabinet that made the decision that a certain course of action should have been taken in connection with Bruce Stadium, that the Chief Minister would go forth and act unlawfully? Of course they did not. They assumed, as I assumed, as I was there as a member, that she would go away and she would do that within the law.

There was another proviso, Mr Speaker, on that Cabinet approval that the Chief Minister has been careful to avoid. In the propaganda sheet that she put out yesterday, selectively, to certain people in the media only, she said, and I quote:

There is a new concept for you, the CFU is the Government's bank, but this was to be done. What she did not say was that there was a time limit on it and that that temporary financing arrangement through the CFU was all to be wound up, finalised, by 30 June 1998. Well, it has not been, has it? It is now 30 June 1999 and it still has not been wound up. So we get these half-truths. The Chief Minister talks about openness and transparency, but you never get the full story. Even in the propaganda sheet put out yesterday to selected members of the media the Chief Minister could not bring herself to tell the whole truth, just the bit that she wants the media to know and that puts a spin on the story. Anyway, so much for the Cabinet decision that made it okay. It did not make it okay, and Mr Moore knows that it did not make it okay.

Then Mrs Carnell said, "Well, even though the Cabinet-decision argument did not go down, it was okay because we acted within the net appropriation concept". Well, that was soon exploded because net appropriations have nothing to do with borrowing money for capital expenditure. So that one did not last very long either. In any case, Mrs Carnell then said, "It's actually an investment and therefore is covered with the new guidelines under the law that I've just issued". She did not tell us about that either. We only found out two weeks after the guideline had been issued that she had issued it. Open and transparent, are we not? We are making sure that everybody knows what is going on. Of course, that fails also.

First of all, the Auditor-General himself has queried whether it is actually an investment. More importantly, one of the legal advices that were obtained came from Professor Richardson, and is the Chief Minister or any member of the Government going to stand up and say that Professor Richardson's view does not count? He goes to great lengths to explain that under the system that was in force at the time it could not have been regarded as an investment because, and I quote:

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