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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1487 ..

approach! What sort of leadership by their elected representatives does this show to the people of the ACT?

Enough of that one. The next one is from Mrs Dunne in September. Again, this was about Mr Corbell. Mrs Dunne said:

As I said on that day, one of the most important things you can learn in life, and in politics, is to admit it, when you have made a mistake. Mr Corbell will never admit it, when he has made a mistake, and it is about time he was brought to book.

I do not care that we made a mistake. I would care if this opposition didn’t care that it made a mistake. I would care if we didn’t do anything about rectifying a mistake. I care that this government has not done anything about rectifying the mistake. This parliament voted by a majority for a simple negotiation to take place. Since that time almost a month has passed, and this minister has done nothing.

I go to comments that were made by Mrs Dunne in this place about this report:

I thank the committee for its report. I apologise again to members for the thoughtlessness of this action and apologise to members for the amount of effort that they have had to put into addressing this matter. I hope that we can all put it down to experience. I will learn from it and I hope that others members will.

I thought that that was very good. I thought that it was a very contrite comment and she was prepared to accept responsibility. That comment was made on 30 March. On 1 April we have the comment, “It’s no skin off my nose and I know I haven’t done anything wrong.” I was told by the journalist that that was a direct quote and is accurate—he had his notes there. “I know I haven’t done anything wrong” indicates to me an abrogation of responsibility. It wipes out the comment of the 30th showing that she was accepting responsibility and contrite. She has contradicted it with that arrogant comment.

It was interesting to me, having read the Hansard of Tuesday’s debate on this report, that Mr Cornwell started off the debate by saying, “The first point I would make is here but for the grace of God go any of us.” My comment on that smug little comment by Mr Cornwell is that it can only be interpreted as meaning that we all probably would have done the same thing. Wrong! That comment is pure sophistry. Every time one of us makes a minimising comment like that we diminish ourselves in fact and in the eyes of the community. It is a shameful sort of apology for what was determined by the committee to be improper behaviour.

That is not something that requires the establishment of a special development course for members. The average person in the street would know that such conduct is out of order and it is just a matter of who abides by the accepted norms of conduct and who disregards them. I will not be party to this sort of diminishing responsibility for misconduct. Mr Hargreaves’s reminder of what Mrs Dunne said during a censure motion in November 2003 shows clearly that she spouts principles when it suits her but does not necessarily abide by those principles in her own case.

Mr Cornwell’s other smug little comment from the security blanket of his chair was about the in camera evidence that I gave. I make it very clear in this chamber that the only reason that I requested to give that evidence in camera was to avoid another Liberal Party-cum-media circus like we had during the privileges/email affair of 2002. I was not

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