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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1792 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
Some subsequent confusion has arisen as the result of a press release issued by both Mr Gower and by Ms Roma Hosking. The press release has raised a number of contradictions. Mr Gower appears to contradict his previous evidence, but it does not seem all that clear on the face of it. I am not entirely sure what Mr Gower is saying in his press release. It is not entirely clear. It is not an unequivocal resiling from his evidence. He does not say in his press release, "Look, what I said to the committee was simply wrong; I was not telling the truth." He does not say that.
Ms Roma Hosking, in the opening remarks in her letter which the minister read, contradicts her president. Mr Gower, in his evidence to the committee on that same day, referred in his opening statement to the Gungahlin Community Council's position on the Gungahlin extension of the John Dedman Drive. He said, and I quote:
The Gungahlin Community Council was prepared to support either proposed route.
He said that at the time the Gungahlin Community Council participated in the Maunsell discussions, a fact referred to by Ms Hosking in her letter in which she says that that was the clear position of the Gungahlin Community Council during the Maunsell discussions, they supported the eastern route. I just heard the Minister read that out. Well, Mr Gower does not agree with that. Mr Corbell said to Mr Gower:
I understood until recently that the community council formally took the view that the council would not enter into the debate about which alignment, as long as reservation for a road was made. Could you explain to me why that has changed?
Mr Gower went on to say yes. He said this:
Certainly. When debate was starting on Gungahlin Drive, as Gungahlin residents took it, back in the 1997 Maunsell discussions, we were quite amenable to either route.
Ms Hosking disagrees with that. So we have these conflicts. We have a range of conflicts about exactly who believes what and who said what. We have Ms Hosking coming out in her defence of the minister and contradicting her president and the evidence that he gave to the committee. So there is all this confusion around subsequent events.
The appropriate way to deal with the confusion is through the process that Mr Corbell has initiated. That is the appropriate process. There are very serious matters of principle at stake here that go to the integrity of this Assembly and its committee system. We have on the record evidence from a witness about certain facts as he sees them. We have his view on certain facts. We have his view on the fact that pressure was applied to him by the minister that if the Gungahlin Community Council did not support the eastern alignment the government simply would not build a road at all. That was the evidence from Mr Gower which is on the record.
We now believe, following subsequent events, that that might not be true. The minister stands up and confesses that it certainly is not true, but the difficulty for us is that it is on the record. It is on the Hansard record. The only way for this matter to be appropriately
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