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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (10 July) . . Page.. 2433 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

Bruce Stadium, and we will be interested in the response of Mr Osborne and Mr Rugendyke to the Auditor-General's report on Bruce Stadium. We saw it when she refused to accept any responsibility for criticisms of her government made by the coroner in his report on the tragic hospital implosion. Why should we expect different behaviour on this occasion from a Chief Minister desperate to cling to power but, as always, looking for the can-do fix that avoided having to accept Labor's solution?

Mr Corbell: She doesn't like listening to this, Jon.

MR STANHOPE: She does not; not at all. It is unusual for the Chief Minister not to like to listen to her own speeches.

There were others who ignored convention or rationalised its place. The Canberra Times produced a stunning reversal of opinion. On the day of the budget debate, the Times' deputy editor, Mr Hull, in a very learned opinion, as he is wont, said that if the budget were to fall, the likelihood was that the Chief Minister would resign. There was a beautiful big heading in the Canberra Times of the Thursday of the debate: "If Budget defeated, first task is to elect new chief minister-Analysis, Crispin Hull." He went on to say that, if that happened, the Chief Minister would resign. That was on the day of the budget debate but before the vote.

Mr Hull went on to say that she and her Treasurer had indicated "that the government would stand or fall on the budget". The reported position of the government was that it would stand or fall on the budget. Mr Hull went on in his analysis to say that if the government did not get the budget passed, the first thing it would do would be to resign. A day later Mr Hull suggested that that might not happen. In fact, we discovered that in Mr Hull's opinion-this was news to all of us and it is something that continues to shock me-the ACT is not even governed pursuant to the principles of the Westminster system and thus the conventions did not apply.

Presumably, on the intervening day Mr Hull took a stroll down the road to Damascus, and that is always dangerous, given the incidence of lightning strikes on that particular road. But the Times, of course, has never been reluctant to back the Chief Minister, and when we read the editorial on the Saturday we were not at all surprised at the opening statement-

Mr Berry: You can always tell the depth of the hole she has dug for herself.

MR STANHOPE: That is right. Two days later, the road to Damascus having been travelled, the lightning having struck, unfortunately, for Mr Hull, the Chief Minister, Kate Carnell, is within her rights not to resign. That was two days after Mr Hull's article on the Thursday that the first thing the Chief Minister should do is resign.

There was one surprise in the Canberra Times editorial, of course. The one surprise, as I have indicated elsewhere, is not that they discovered two days later, to Mr Hull's continuing embarrassment, I am sure, that Mrs Carnell did not have to resign at all. The one surprise with the editorial was that it was not on the front page.

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