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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1890 ..

MRS DUNNE

That is the sort of comment which is becoming legion in this place and which is unacceptable. This Assembly has to do something about it now. It has to stop the rot or we will never be able to find out anything that this government does, or successive governments do, because there will be a permeated culture of avoiding the question, of finding ways to obfuscate.

My point is that this lack of courtesy and the refusal to assist with information reflects a culture of arrogance, of smugness, of disregard for the Assembly which characterises every part of this government. That smugness and that disregard for this Assembly are, in fact, a smugness and a disregard for the people of the ACT.

This government continues to deny responsibility for this memo. Quite frankly, it is very difficult to believe that it was, as the minister said, just the work of one person acting by himself. From looking at the documents provided, we know that there is a path that leads to that person who wrote that document and leads from it.

The most alarming thing about it is that one full week before it became known to the public, the chief executive officer of the department of health and all of his executives knew of its existence and, from what we can tell, did nothing about it. Of course, when it became public, everyone was so penitential, so sorry and so remorseful. That came about only because they were sprung. They were sprung, and that was the only thing that made them remorseful. The sin was that they were caught, Mr Speaker. All through this estimates process we find matters coming up over and over again on which people are being caught out. There are trails everywhere that show that things are going wrong in this place.

Let's look at the Treasurer's Advance. What a convoluted web we have there. What was the Treasurer's Advance for? Why was something suddenly so urgent, but 15 months later more than $8 million of the money for it has not been spent? And then we have the chronology of the bushfire. How many times in this place and other places did we have to ask for a chronology of the bushfire? From 4 February we were asking for a chronology of the bushfire. We know that it existed from about that time. It took a great deal of probing and wheedling but eventually, towards the end of May, we got that chronology of the bushfire.

This is a culture of covering up. It took us more than three months to get that simple document that existed all the time, and this was from a government whose catchcry during the election was about being open and accountable. We have it here with the Canberra Stadium media box, a contract that was cemented by a nod, a wink, a shake of a hand and a fax late on a Friday night. I would really like to be able to find the tradesmen who get a fax on Friday night and turn up on Monday morning with their sledgehammers to start a demolition. I think that homeowners all round town would be beating a path to their door if they could get tradesmen to turn around that fast.

A whole range of other things have happened. (Extension of time granted.) For two years, the Estimates Committee has been trying to get to the bottom of whether the owners of Horse Park Estate stage 1 were given extra blocks. Last year we were told, "No, nothing of that sort has happened."This year we were responded to in the most convoluted way imaginable. After eventually being provided, quite outside the time

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