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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1842 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

There is no embellishment, no fiction, no fantasy. These are cold, hard, legal opinions. One of the opinions even recommended that all of the papers connected to these matters should be sent immediately to the DPP.

Mr Humphries: What is the basis for that?

MR KAINE: I note that the Attorney-General, who is about to interject, acted on that, did he not? He was not game because he knows what the results would be. So, acting as the chief law officer of this Territory, he sits on it and does nothing. Of course, Mr Speaker, this Attorney-General has been complicit in all of this. He has not sat there as the deputy leader of the party and the Minister Assisting the Treasurer during all this time without being privy to what is going on. He knows well what has been going on. So, to the extent that the law has been broken, it has been broken with the complicity of the Attorney-General. I just cannot imagine how much of the law our Attorney-General is prepared to sit there and see flouted before he does something about it. But, I suppose we cannot expect much better from an Attorney-General who was the receiver of stolen goods, namely, Cabinet documents stolen from the Federal Parliament, and did nothing about it. He stood up in here and acted as though it was perfectly acceptable.

Mr Humphries: I ask that that be withdrawn, Mr Speaker. It is totally untrue.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Kaine, please withdraw that. Please withdraw the imputation. This has been a good debate. It has been a well-behaved debate. I do not want to see it deteriorate.

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, you cannot refute the facts. If the Attorney-General is offended by the facts, then I withdraw them, but the facts still stand.

MR SPEAKER: I want an unqualified withdrawal, please.

Mr Humphries: It is untrue, Trevor, and you know it.

MR KAINE: Oh, aren't we offended? Righto. The facts are on the table, but I withdraw them. Of course, we have the same sort of dissembling from Little Sir Echo over here, Mr Moore, haven't we, the Liberal fellow traveller. Compare the responses of the Attorney-General and Mr Moore to the charges that have been laid by the Leader of the Opposition against the Chief Minister and actions that have been taken within the administration. Unfortunately, Mr Stefaniak is involved in this too. Compare Mr Moore's performance today with the witch-hunt that he initiated when some allegation was made against a person in the health organisation about releasing some letter to the public. No stone remained unturned to find the culprit and punish that person as harshly as she or he can be punished under the Public Service Act. That was Mr Moore's response to a trivial thing like that. Of course, the same question can be asked about those minor functionaries in a public school somewhere who made some errors in putting their statistics together about the students, and the full force of the law is going to be brought against them; but the Chief Minister commits an illegal act and these people sit there complicit and they argue in defence.

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