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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1793 ..

duties and responsibilities to the fullest extent of their abilities, and no more so than when they are called upon to show leadership in times of threat or stress to the community, that is, that they are, in short, up to the task and on top of their jobs.

Let us look now at some of the matters that arise from reviewing what has been reported. A check of the phone records of Emergency Services Bureau executive director Mike Castle has shown that he called the acting emergency services minister, Mr Stanhope, at 7.14 pm on Friday 17 January. Mr Stanhope said that the call went to message bank and contained no words. He, the acting emergency services minister at the time, says he had no memory of Mr Castle’s call.

Bearing in mind that conditions at the time could be considered relatively threatening and therefore demanding the close and near-continuous attention of responsible officials up and down the chain of authority, the following questions arise. On the evening of 17 January, Mike Castle phoned the acting emergency services minister, Mr Stanhope, but did not leave a message. Why would he ring his minister and not bother to leave a message? Which of the minister’s phones did he call? Having failed to talk to the minister on that phone, did he attempt to contact the minister on alternative phones available to him, as presumably any other conscientious official would have done? If not, why not? If he did try to contact the minister on all phones available to him, but failed, why was the minister apparently not contactable at such a time? If he did not persist in trying to contact the minister, was it because the matter was of no importance? If it was not of importance, why was he trying to contact the minister at that time of day? Has Mr Castle been asked what that call was about? If so, what did he say—if he remembers?

One of the differing versions the Canberra Times has put out in the last week reports that Mr Keady called Mr Stanhope at 9.10 am on 18 January 2003. The call went to message bank. Neither Mr Keady nor Mr Stanhope could remember that call or what it was about. Almost an hour later, at 10.09 am, Mr Stanhope evidently retrieved the message and called Mr Keady—although information in the Saturday 8 May Canberra Times records Mr Keady telling the inquiry that it was he who called the minister both times. The two men then spoke for almost seven minutes. Again, neither of them can remember that phone call or what was said during the call. This is an odd comment: if you cannot remember a call occurring, it seems superfluous to say you do not remember what was said during the call.

Is it not surprising that both of these apparently intelligent senior officials in positions of such responsibility have such poor memories that they can recall nothing of this conversation on the morning of a day that was not shaping up too positively for the ACT? Isn’t the coincidence of these men’s memory lapses more than passing strange? Are such seemingly muddled officials suited to occupy the positions they do? Can they be considered up to the job? Have they wound up in appointments beyond their natural levels of competence?

Mr Stanhope’s apology for inadvertently misleading the people of the ACT was followed by some comments on radio and to my office suggesting that Mr Stanhope might have been suffering some sort of traumatic stress following his previous involvement in helping to rescue a man from drowning and that this “condition” might have adversely affected his memory. Up until this opinion emerged I was unaware that the specialist medical expertise that would enable someone to make such a diagnosis was held by quite

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