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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1772 ..

the time. Once that had been revealed, and it was only revealed by the McLeod inquiry—there is a one-line reference at about page 35 of the report—suddenly everybody remembered that they had been warned, but nobody has attempted to correct that misleading.

What was the state of emergency about? It was not about fire. It was about the possibility of a blackout because the powerlines may go down. There was a chance that 80 per cent of Canberra would be blacked out. Nobody else had ever heard of this excuse. Even the Chief Police Officer, who would have been the emergency controller, said that he first heard about it when he read it in the paper. Apparently, Actew was not told that there was the chance of a blackout of 80 per cent of Canberra. You would have thought that Actew might have known. Mr Quinlan used to work for Actew. That excuse does not hold water either because for an 80 per cent blackout to occur in the ACT the substation at Macgregor would have to burn. That is the only way it could have happened.

The excuse given by the government was the possibility of arcing between the wires causing a blackout. That is simply not true. Two wires come over the mountains. Two other wires come from other power stations. Even if the two wires coming over the mountains had burned and collapsed, the other two wires would have had adequate capacity to fuel the ACT’s electricity needs.

What was happening in the mountains? The powerlines were arcing; there were brownouts. There was hazing, and it was happening for two or three days before the fires came through. But they did not burn out and they did not collapse. An emergency declaration over a blackout was a fabrication at a later point.

We then get to the point that cabinet never thought the fire was serious. We have had Mr Corbell break ranks and say that he asked questions about warnings. He certainly thought it was serious. The one that I find very disturbing is the emphatic declaration by the Chief Minister that Phil Cheney never told anyone. Mr Stanhope said:

As to whether or not, as Mr Pratt has just stated, Mr Cheney advised the Emergency Services Bureau that the fire was likely to reach Canberra, and the Emergency Services Bureau concurred in that, those things are news to me.

He then said that Mr Cheney had not told emergency services and he attacked Mr Cheney. He attacked the man who is the guru on fires in this country. We now know that, on the 14th Mr Lucas-Smith, told Mr Keady that Mr Cheney had told him. So the government did know.

We then get to the issue of the chronology of events on that day. Mr Speaker, the first question I asked on 18 February last year was whether we could have such a chronology. I asked:

…can you tell the Assembly the chronology of events on that day…

We had the following fabulous interjection from Mr Hargreaves on the Chief Minister:

What did you have for breakfast?

I was fobbed off. The Chief Minister said that there was no chronology. He said:

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