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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1771 ..

If Mr Stanhope were sincere in his position, he would have checked his records when he was first under scrutiny over a year ago. Yet he told us last week that his staff had only checked in the last week of April this year. Far from apologising for this extraordinary delay and for a year of misleading the Assembly, he had the arrogance to try to boast that the matter had been raised only through the initiative of his staff.

Mr Stanhope did not take the initiative; as the clipping shows, he had been caught out by the scrutiny of others. There is widespread speculation that Mr Stanhope and his office have come forward only because the staff of the coronial inquiry had made inquiries concerning the vital phone records. I cannot help seeing an eerie similarity between what Mr Stanhope did on the day of the fire—neglect, then denial, all followed by a boast that he had acted of his own initiative to correct the situation—and his dubious account of how his actions in misleading this Assembly finally came to light.

Mr Speaker, the Chief Minister has misled us repeatedly over more than a year. (Further extension of time granted.) The very first instance of misleading came on the very first day of sitting after the fire, in the special sitting that we had on 30 January 2003, when Mr Stanhope continued to give the impression that the fire was unexpected. He said in his speech:

Mr Speaker, the firestorm that hit Canberra on 18 January was a disaster of an unprecedented scale in the ACT…

The fire was not on an unprecedented scale, as we have since found out. The early estimations that it was a 100-year event are simply not true. Similar fires happened in 1939, 1952 and 1983. If the experts had been consulted, they would have said that it was a 10 or 20-year fire, which is what they said.

We then get to the declaration of a state of emergency. On 18 February 2003, Mr Stefaniak asked the Chief Minister to tell the Assembly how he went about declaring a state of emergency. The Chief Minister was then asked the following supplementary question:

My supplementary question is: when were you first informed that a state of emergency might be necessary?

Mr Stanhope answered:

Between 2.00 and 2.30 pm—or 1400 and 1430 hours, as the Emergency Services Bureau likes to put it—on Saturday, 18 January.

Mr Speaker, that is a misleading statement. That was not the first time. I can quote the text from the coronial inquiry. We have an article that says that Mr Keady told the court the he was sure that those at the meeting discussed the possibility of fires reaching the urban area. He said that the possibility of a state of emergency being declared was also discussed on 16 January.

We know from more detail that has emerged from the cabinet briefing that cabinet clearly was aware of the possibility of a state of emergency being declared because it had left the decision to the Chief Minister as he was going to be the only minister around at

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