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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2648 ..

MR STEFANIAK

Assembly. That is not our role tonight. We do not have the judicial authority, as it were, to decide that.

We are setting up an Assembly committee of our peers to have a hearing, take further evidence, hear from the persons concerned, no doubt, sift through all the facts, any documents and any statements, call relevant persons, and see at that stage, after all of that evidence, whether there has been, in fact, what constitutes a contempt. If the findings are that there was one instance of contempt or more, obviously the matter would come back to this Assembly for consideration as to what action it should take as a result. Obviously, if no instance of contempt was found, the third stage would not matter.

It is a little bit like, I suppose, any court case or prosecution. We are at the stage where certain evidence was taken by the committee and the committee made some findings. There is now a proposal to send the matter to a select committee to consider whether there has been an instance of contempt; in other words, to give detailed consideration to that, to take evidence and to decide on that. But the stage we are at now, I would suggest, is that prima facie, because of the findings of this Estimates Committee on the facts they have gathered, it is the duty of this Assembly to send this matter to a committee to decide whether there has been contempt.

The Estimates Committee, in its sittings, actually made findings on a number of key facts. At pages 17 and 18 of its report it cites a number of matters in relation to Mr Wood. My colleague Mrs Dunne has read out the statement that the minister made. On page 18, the committee stated:

The Minister's grounds for declining to answer questions were twofold. Firstly, he believed that, despite established practice, these matters were not appropriate to an Estimates Committee. As outlined above, the Committee does not accept this.

The committee has already made a decision in relation to those matters. The report continued:

Secondly, the minister put forward the view that the current McLeod inquiry and the Coroner's inquiry into the bushfires made it inappropriate to answer questions in the Committee.

The Committee is concerned that this approach wholly misunderstands the relationship between witnesses, including ministers, and a committee of the Assembly and the grounds on which a witness may decline to answer questions.

The committee goes on to talk about that, saying that it does not accept that.

I think it is worth noting-I do not know whether the committee actually made the point-that the coronial inquest had not started. Another point it probably did not make is the fact that it would have been quite proper for the questions to be asked and answers given even if a coronial inquest was going on. Indeed, that might have been of some assistance to a coronial inquest. Those two additional points indicate that maybe the minister was quite mistaken in his view and it was not appropriate for him not to answer questions.

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