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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 13 ..

Environment Committee, to have asked our secretary to write to the 3,000 people who signed the petition that sparked the inquiry in the first place. That would have been an unwarranted use of the resources of the Legislative Assembly, so I put together 200 pamphlets or thereabouts—I think it was 200 pamphlets—with the intention of trying to communicate with some of those people.

But there is an overlap. I am also the ACT Liberals’ spokesperson on planning and environment—and the ACT Liberal Party has views about Aldi—and I am the chair of the committee. However, as I said to my colleagues at the time, and I do not resile from this, to think that, because I expressed this view here, somehow three other intelligent people who hold strong private views, some of which coincide with mine, would be cowed into changing their views or coming up with a recommendation that was inconsistent with the evidence is beyond belief.

We have four strong-willed, intelligent people on the committee who express their views on a regular basis. Those views had been expressed by most of those people in the public arena prior to this inquiry being sent to the committee. I think that members were right when they said to me that, once it came to the committee, we should not have spoken publicly. That is the breach of protocol, that is the lapse of judgment, that is at the heart of this and that is the lapse of judgment for which I have apologised. It is very difficult to wear all those hats and in this case I think I failed. In the great scheme of things, it is not a very big failure and it is a failure that I owned up to straightaway.

Ms Tucker has said that I did stand down and she wanted to know my motivation. My motivation, for the information of the Assembly, was that I wanted to remove all possible perception of bias. Once it was brought to my attention that there was a perception of bias, I needed to remove that for the good of the Assembly, for the good of the committee and so that no-one could criticise the report. However, the trouble is that every time that the Planning and Environment Committee goes into an inquiry, its members have already expressed their views on the subject, probably more so than the members of any other committee. I draw your attention to draft variation 200, on which most of the members had expressed views about the outcome.

Sometimes members change their views in the process of the inquiry. (Extension of time granted.) As I have said in this place on a number of occasions, I am particularly proud of the Planning and Environment Committee and its members’ capacity to leave their ideologies at the door. Had we ever gone through the process of having a full inquiry—and the committee will continue to conduct an inquiry—I am sure that the members would have left their private views at the door, as I would have done. However, to ensure that there is no doubt about that, I have stood aside.

The Chief Minister interjected that I had a clear conflict of interest, but I do not have a conflict of interest. I have an interest in the subject, but that is not a conflict of interest. That interest is an opinion. I do not have any pecuniary interests whose outcomes will be favoured by this. I have an opinion about the subject; that is not a conflict of interest.

What has been done was, on my part, lacking in judgment and I apologise again for that. However, I think that, seeing that there was clearly no intent to subvert the activities of the committee—because I hold the committee system in very high esteem—and given

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