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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1777 ..

I have almost always prefaced my answers with the phrase “To the best of my recollection”, or “To the best of my knowledge”. I have been careful to do that because I know the sheer volume of meetings and telephone calls and conversations that occurred during that hectic period. But on occasions, as I have confessed, I have failed to make the qualification. For example, on 21 April this year I told ABC Radio that no calls had come to me on 17 January or on the morning of 18 January. I told the ABC TV’s Stateline program that I had not heard from anyone at ESB of the morning of the 18th. I made both those statements without qualification.

Those are two examples of unqualified comments I made in public, and in so doing I did mislead the community. They were inadvertent, and in stark contrast to the bulk of my comments, which were almost invariably qualified. There may be other examples, and they are equally inadvertent.

I have detailed the manner in which I inadvertently misled the Assembly and the public, and the circumstances in which those mistakes occurred. I do not believe that any reading of my statements to the coroner, or the transcript of the evidence I gave to the inquiry, will reveal any misleading comments, despite the rather desperate allusions and false statements the Leader of the Opposition has made on the public record. I did not mislead the coroner.

But I did mislead the Assembly and the public. It is a matter of record that on the afternoon of Monday, 3 May—Monday last week, budget eve—a member of my staff informed me that telephone records of Mr Mike Castle, the Chief Executive of the Emergency Services Bureau at the time of the bushfires, as tendered to the coronial inquiry, showed he had made a call to my mobile telephone at 7.14 pm on 17 January 2003. I was told that Mr Castle’s records showed the call lasted six seconds. I was further told by my staff member that a check of my mobile phone records showed a call had been diverted to my message bank at the same time. It is fair to assume the two records are of the same call from Mr Castle.

I was also told that a further check of my telephone log, for the morning of Saturday, 18 January 2003 showed a call had been diverted to my message bank at 9.10 am, and that I had made a call to a mobile number at 10.09 am. My staff told me that that call had been to the mobile number of Mr Keady. The conversation lasted six minutes and 45 seconds.

For the sake of easing Mr Smyth’s curiosity, might I say that my telephone records show seven calls from my phone on 17 January: to my office, to my chief of staff, to my message bank, and one private number. On the morning of the 18th there are three: to my message bank, to Mr Keady and to my home. Mr Smyth is anxious to know if, attempts to contact me having failed, calls were made from officials to my senior staff on either the evening of the 17th or the morning of the 18th. The answer is no. I rang my chief of staff from the ESB early on the afternoon of the 18th and asked him to contact my media adviser and both of them came to Curtin. Mr Smyth will simply have to accept that there is no conspiracy.

Mr Smyth will have to accept that the fact that officials did not contact my chief of staff or anyone in my office confirms what I have always said: that the advice I was receiving

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