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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1766 ..

was on constant watch; that the Chief Minister understood that he might be called on at any moment to issue a historic state of emergency declaration and that this was a time, unlike any other in the city’s history, when political leaders might be called upon to show community leadership. Then suddenly, disastrously, that leadership went missing.

On the afternoon of Friday the 17th, as the lead officials in both ACT and NSW firefighting were facing the truth about the inevitable disaster, the minister for emergency services, Mr Wood, took leave. Ministers do need to take leave, and January is generally a good time to take it, but what can we say about this timing? Whatever one thinks of this decision—and I will not dwell on it—the role of the emergency services minister needed to pass swiftly and professionally to an acting minister. Never, since self-government, had a Chief Minister been so acutely burdened with the responsibility of ensuring that this key ministerial role was not just being filled but carried out with diligence and competence. Mr Quinlan seems to have been considered—he had been the minister for a year until just a few weeks beforehand—but he was taking leave to go to Melbourne to watch the Australian Open. So, fatefully, Mr Stanhope himself became the acting minister for emergency services.

It is in this role that Mr Stanhope clearly failed. As we shall debate today he failed to fulfil the vital ministerial responsibilities of emergency services minister in the brief space of time he held that role. Ever since he has led the people of Canberra down a path of obfuscation, denial and memory loss to try to cloud over the events of that period and avoid responsibility for his lack of action. We must remember that, from the day of the fires, the one great cause of anger in this community—which in other ways has rallied without recrimination—has been the demand to know why they were not warned. The man in the key position to decide that they should be warned—perhaps the one man with the capacity to get that warning on the airwaves in time—has hidden from that demand. In fact, the acting minister has worked so hard to create the impression that he could not have warned the public, because he did not know, that he has asked us all to believe an entire series of amazing acts of miscommunication and neglect of his ministerial duty.

He tells us that, from the time he became minister on Friday 17 January, he did not believe that the danger from the fires warranted him to seek any information about how they were progressing. Nor did he attempt to contact any member of the leadership of the emergency services, even though he already had a working relationship with the chief executive, Tim Keady, through his role as Attorney-General. He would have us believe it was reasonable that those officers did not alert him in any way, and that such a culture of not being told was acceptable to him. Indeed, he has repeatedly told us that he took no action, nor made any communication, until 12.40 on Saturday 18 January when he decided of his own initiative to drive to the emergency services headquarters. Indeed, he would have us believe that he did this even without calling anyone, or anyone calling him first.

That story alone portrays a serious neglect of duty. In several points it does not make sense, and in key points we now know that it is simply not true. We now know that on the Friday evening, at around 7.14 pm, as the reality of the collapse of the fire defences in the bush was occupying all his thoughts, the director of emergency services, Mike Castle, rang his acting minister. The phone call was not answered, so Castle left six seconds of message—or silence—on the Chief Minister’s message bank. Mr Stanhope

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