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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1767 ..

now claims that he can remember nothing about this call, or returning the call, except that—absurdly—he recalls that it contained no words. We do not know what words it did contain, but it was most unlikely to be silence.

Most Canberrans believe that the message went something like this—if members look at the second hand on a clock, six seconds is a long time on a message bank when you could most reasonably say, without any effort at all—“Minister, this is Mike Castle. Please call me back. It’s urgent.” Whatever the words were, how could they not have conveyed the clear impression that the director sought to speak to his minister in a time of crisis? How can the message not have prompted a responsible minister, in a time of crisis, to respond? Indeed, if he had the miscall and he recognised it as Mr Castle’s number, how can he not have chosen to ring back—or decided not to ring back?

Here we have a very thorny problem for the acting minister. If he did not return the call, he was clearly neglectful in his duty. Yet if he did return it, then he has lied to everyone and a crucial phone call remains to be revealed.

We can only speculate as to what might have happened differently if Mr Stanhope had called Mr Castle back. It is interesting to look at where Mr Castle was at that time. From the minutes of the emergency services meeting at that point, Mr Castle would have been at a meeting that had just been told that the fire was expected at Duffy by 8 o’clock the following evening. That is the determination in those minutes. If you had a message like that to give to the Chief Minister, you would have rung a second time. I would conclude that Mr Castle did not have to ring back a second time because he got to the Chief Minister the first time.

We can only speculate as to what might have been done differently, what might have happened, had the minister risen to the role of minister and taken a new direction. Might he and Mr Castle have discussed a warning? Might he and Mr Castle have discussed warning the public? Perhaps Mr Stanhope could have called the radio stations that night, or the Canberra Times, and done the public the immense service of saying that he, as Chief Minister, felt that the people needed to know what was happening.

Canberra might have had more than 18 hours to prepare for what was to come. Many thousands of different decisions would have been made across the city on that fateful day. But Mr Stanhope tells us that he made no response to that call. To be specific, he tells us that he does not recall making any response. Perhaps his recollection will be revised yet again one day.

The next day most of the senior officials met at 8.00 am and 9.30 am to discuss evacuations, warnings and the prospect of a state of emergency. As the first meeting was ending, at around 9.10 am that day, chief executive Keady rang his acting minister and again there was no answer, but we now know that Mr Stanhope, at last, rang him back an hour later. We also know that at that time—at 10.09 am—they would have discussed the potential for the fires to approach the city, the retreat of the staffed staging post from the fire’s path, and other matters that Mr Keady recounted to the coroner several days ago. How could they not have discussed warning the public? How could they not? Yet Mr Stanhope denied that for over a year. He tells us that he forgot it.

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