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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1775 ..

• In a media release of 5 May he referred to the “Alan Bond excuse”. He said “collective amnesia was heavily impeding the work of the Coroner’s Court”.

• In another media release of 6 May he said that my version of events had “been challenged by evidence” given by Mr Keady, who at the time of the fires was Chief Executive of the Department of Justice and Community Safety. He referred to a rumour that I had not informed my Labor Party colleagues that I planned to make the statement I made to the Assembly last week.

• On 5 May he told ABC Radio that he thought he knew what message Mike Castle had left me when he rang on the evening of 17 January. He said I was obviously not under any stress or alarm on the morning of 18 January, because I had a cup of coffee with my son. It was “a long bow”, Mr Smyth said, “to say we”—the government—“didn’t ‘know that something was about to happen’.”

• In the Canberra Times of the same date, Mr Smyth was quoted as saying, “For 16 months Jon Stanhope has consistently said ‘I was not told, I was not called, I did not know’.”

The Leader of the Opposition has a penchant for colourful language, for the deft one-liner. This is a skill he has developed, no doubt, in an effort to increase his chances of a run on the nightly news, or a headline in the paper. It is unfortunate, however, that the search for relevance leads to such over-dramatic beat-ups, because that approach inevitably means the facts are ignored and the truth is stretched.

I said that this is a serious motion; it deserves a serious response, even if we do have a somewhat theatrical approach. This is what happened. In an estimates committee hearing of 19 May 2003, Mrs Cross asked me questions about the morning of 18 January and when I was advised to declare a state of emergency. In my answers, I said:

I didn’t even speak with a member of the Emergency Services Bureau or any other senior officer of, indeed, any member of the ACT public service before midday. At no stage between 12 o’clock and 2 o’clock did anybody raise with me the declaration of a State of Emergency. My first contact with an ACT official on the day of the fire was somewhere between—I’m guessing, I’m guessing this—12 and 12.30, when I had a telephone conversation with Mr Tim Keady, as I was driving to the Emergency Services Bureau; and that was my first conversation.

On 21 August 2003, in answer to a question from Mrs Cross, I said:

I had no conversations with anybody associated with the Emergency Services Bureau before 12.20. I am not quite sure at what stage I did have my first conversation with the Emergency Services Bureau. It was certainly after that.

On 3 March this year Mr Smyth asked me a question about the estimates committee hearing. In my answer, I said:

In terms of timeframes—I am going on memory in relation to the actual times—I attended the Emergency Services Bureau at what one might say is lunchtime; a timeframe that we normally equate to be between 12 o’clock and 2 o’clock. I have

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