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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1795 ..

fact improving? With so many others attending the earlier meeting on 18 January, which seems to have been very important, why was the acting minister for emergency services not interested in being there? Or Mr Keady, for that matter?

Did Mr Stanhope not know about such an important meeting? Had he not been told about this important meeting, perhaps? Was this what Mike Castle had been trying to inform him of the previous evening? If he had not been told, why hadn’t he? Who should have told him? Couldn’t he be tracked down to be told about the meeting? Where was he, if he could not be tracked down? Did he feel it was beneath him to attend that meeting? What was it that was occupying the mind of the acting emergency services minister at the time and took precedence over the potential emergency confronting the ACT? How could the responsible minister be so apparently detached and not contactable at such a time? Can such apparent detachment be considered responsible conduct in the circumstances?

There are many more questions that I could reel off, but I think I have seen enough to lead me to deduce from the facts presented that there is something very dubious about this litany of non-recollection. The pervasive, apparent loss of memory of the matters at the heart of a tragedy of such enormous proportions—a loss of memory that we have seen expressed by officials and others at various levels up and down the line—beggars belief. That so many presumably intelligent and responsible and experienced people have trotted out this common defence of their actions beggars belief.

The Chief Minister, acting emergency services minister at the time, demonstrated such apparently persistent detachment from involving himself, as any minister for emergency services would be expected to do in an emergency situation, that it is difficult not to conclude that his performance was seriously wanting.

The Chief Minister has claimed that after midday on 18 January he went over to the Emergency Services Bureau “of his own volition” to see how thing were going. He made no mention of a meeting underway there at the time—a meeting that, according to the Weekend Australian of 8-9 May 2004, had been going on since 8 that morning and was wrestling with the problem of whether a state of emergency should be declared. The paper reported that, when the Chief Minister/acting emergency services minister was asked for a decision, he said, “You’re the experts. All I want is advice”. The fact is that the decision being sought was not a decision from an expert in the matter of fighting fires; it was a decision from the Chief Minister of the ACT about protecting the safety of the people of the ACT. It was a political decision that was being sought, not an operational decision, although it would also be of operational benefit.

That single, undeniably weak response from the Chief Minister confirmed to me when I read it last Saturday that not only did he not have a grasp of the seriousness of the responsibilities that rested clearly with him and no-one else in such a situation, but that he also did not possess the basic attributes for the leadership needed when the chips were down. And this same sort of evasion of responsibility was reflected in testimony that the chief executive the Chief Minister’s Department at the time gave to the coronial inquiry, to the effect that to have declared a state of emergency at that time, when Canberra had never before declared a state of emergency, would have been a dramatic response, only to the taken in the “most extreme contingency”. What sort of comment is that?

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