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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1779 ..

As I have said, I have no memory of receiving or making those calls, let alone of their content. Mr Keady has said the same thing. Yet Mr Keady told the inquest that inevitably the calls were about the bushfire emergency, and of course that must be the case. Mr Keady offered some speculation about the content of our conversation—speculation that it must have been an update on the fire situation, in particular an update of events that had occurred on 17 January.

Mr Keady in evidence confirmed what Mr Castle’s telephone records show: that the two men had had a conversation just before 10pm on 17 January. Mr Keady speculated in evidence that he might have brought me up to date with the information Mr Castle had passed on: the evacuation of the Bull’s Head staging centre and the establishment of a new staging centre at Curtin oval; the fire developments in the rural area; and the spotting of the McIntyre’s Hut fire into the pine forests near Uriarra.

That all seems reasonable. It is, in fact, supported by what appeared in Saturday morning’s Canberra Times, which I undoubtedly read, and which was based in large part on what the reporter had been told by Mr Castle in an 18-minute telephone conversation which he had with her at, I think, around 9.00 pm on Friday, two hours after he had rung my mobile number and just before he spoke to Mr Keady.

That information was important, obviously, but it did not cause Mr Castle or Mr Keady particular alarm. Mr Keady agreed with counsel assisting the coroner that it was not crossing his mind on Saturday morning that a declaration of a state of emergency might be a likely possibility.

I do not believe the conversation with Mr Keady covered any more ground than what he has suggested. It did not cause me undue alarm. It has been put to me—and Mr Smyth has suggested, solely on the basis that the call occurred on the morning of 18 January—that the content of the conversation must have been of a critical nature, so critical that it demanded an immediate response. That is a logical absurdity.

We need to look at what was being reported in the media. Mr Castle spoke to the Times on Friday evening. The details of that conversation were reported on the front page of the newspaper on 18 January, under the headline “Bushfires break through”. The first paragraph of the article states:

Fires have escaped containment lines in the ACT and are running out of control, with rural properties along the Namadgi National Park now at risk in the continuing ferocious conditions.

The article goes on to say:

Firefighters were last night battling to protect rangers’ homes in the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve as all three fires in the Namadgi National Park were spreading …

Contained in the body of this publicly available report was a statement attributed to Mr Castle—when I say “publicly available”, it was in the Canberra Times—indicating:

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