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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (6 June) . . Page.. 2056 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

Mr Stanhope made the point that it is terrible that a person would open somebody else's email. Well, Mr Stanhope, I have opened one of your emails. I received an email from a constituent addressed to you. My name was not in the 'cc' box, and it looked ostensibly to be just an email to you. There was no mention of my name. The name that appeared was Jon Stanhope. I clicked on it to open it. It was a letter from a constituent to you about midwifery services. I looked at it and thought, "Well, maybe this is not for me-maybe it has come to me by mistake." I emailed the constituent back. I said, "Dear sir, did you intend for me to get this?" He said, "Yes, I did." That is what happens with email.

Sometimes, Mr Speaker-I am sure you are well aware, being the computer-literate person that you are-when you click on the email, at first glance it is not necessarily intended for you, but you open it to see whether it is or not. Sometimes you download them and sometimes you print them-because of the blind 'cc' facility.

Mr Stanhope: Oh, it has all been just a mistake!

MR SMYTH: Perhaps somebody could explain the blind 'cc' facility to you, because you are clearly not across your computer literacy.

Putting all of that aside, Chief Minister-Mr Speaker, if you please, through you-I showed this to the police, and I then showed them the response email that I got that said the email was intended for me. You could see it on the officer's face: oh, okay-there is a way that somebody might get an email that is intended for them, but it might not look that way.

What we have here is a witch-hunt. What we have here at the behest of the former president of the Civil Liberties Council of the ACT is not natural justice. There is nothing natural about this-this is form. You have form on this. This is like you standing up here a couple of years ago, on your budget response day, and picking on not the Liberal Party, not a member of the government but a DLO-a public servant. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!

Then, in a fit of passion, you think, "Yes, we've got some dirt on the Liberal Party! We will refer this to the police! I am convinced that there is a breach of the law! The cops are going to nail this guy! We will send it to the DPP. I can see jail sentences! The Leader of the Opposition will be forced to abandon his office!" And it blew up in your face.

You are embarrassed, and you ought to be embarrassed, because there is no case to answer. So we are going to resort to the old privilege committee.

Ms Dundas makes a good point. Should this committee get up-I hope it does not-what you are going to do is set in place nothing but a set of witch-hunts because you got it wrong. You, in your anticipation of a cheap victory over Mr Humphries, thought, "We'll get the cops involved." If you were really concerned about breach of privilege, the process was to send it to a privilege committee in the first place.

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