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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 2 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 348 ..

MR STANHOPE: I am just reflecting on that: it was a digression to the effect that you are just intent on playing politics with this incredibly difficult and sensitive issue, an issue around ensuring that we as a parliament and we as a community deliver the best possible services that we can deliver to the most vulnerable people within this community.

What have you done to date? You have just looked for any opportunity that you could find to make politics with the issue of disabilities. You just want to play politics. You want to cover up the fact that you have run the show for the last seven years and you are just about to receive a very critical report into your stewardship of the issue of the delivery of disability services; so you do not want to talk about disability services. You want to talk about any distraction that you can grasp, any distraction that you think you have, and the distraction you think that you have here is a hypothetical situation that if two plus two had not equalled four we might now find the Assembly in conflict with the courts.

What a pity it is not. What a pity it is that the storm that you are seeking to beat up dissipated weeks ago. What a pity it is that the injunction was lifted. What a pity it is that I will be tabling the report today. What a pity it is that the ACT Government Solicitor and, I believe, the Clerk of this place believed that in order to ensure that the report attracted fundamental privileges it had to be tabled in the Assembly-that it could not have been released outside the Assembly, otherwise it would not have attracted privilege. That is the position that the Clerk consistently puts in relation to the tabling of documents outside the sittings of this place. That is the position that the ACT Government Solicitor consistently puts.

Mr Humphries: That is another issue.

MR STANHOPE: Oh, it is another issue, but it is all hypothetical. I could not have tabled the report until today, in any event, because of the advice of the ACT Government Solicitor and because of the advice that the Clerk of this place consistently puts that it would not have attracted privilege. No matter what might have occurred, I would not have been tabling the report until today in any circumstance.

MR PRATT: I have a supplementary question. Chief Minister, flowing from all of that, did you at any time discuss the issue of the rights of the Assembly before deciding not to oppose the injunction on 24 December? Did you not discuss the rights of the families concerned and, indeed, the Assembly with the Speaker and the Clerk, given that there was legal advice on this matter provided by Clayton Utz in June of last year?

Mr Quinlan: How many times is that?

MR STANHOPE: I did answer that question.

Mr Pratt: Not entirely, no, you did not.

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