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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1801 ..

bank while acting minister for emergency services on the day, and the hours, leading up to the biggest bushfire disaster Canberra has ever seen.

Did the acting minister for emergency services live up to his responsibilities in that portfolio area and the greater responsibility of Chief Minister as well on 17 and 18 January 2003? The answer to that question is no. Therefore, I sincerely believe that the Chief Minister did not take “reasonable steps to ensure the factual content of statements in the Assembly were soundly based”. Let’s go back to our code. Remember that quote? Reasonable steps would have been to check his own phone records to ensure the factual content of his statements was soundly based—not to have a staff member suddenly discover these records and the information they held within them.

There is a related theme here, too, in the Chief Minister’s behaviour: in relation to challenging situations, if you do not ask anything or if you do not volunteer any information or record anything—or, indeed, do anything—then you cannot be blamed when it goes pear shaped; there is no paper trail. (Extension of time granted.) This allows plausible deniability. That is the culture that has developed under this Chief Minister with respect to the governance of this territory—an abrogation of ministerial responsibility because retaining power at any expense is crucial in Labor’s and the Chief Minister’s thinking.

We know now that Mr Cheney’s urgent advice and that of other experienced and expert people was ignored in favour of what has clearly turned out to be ignorant, flawed and horribly inaccurate advice from some bureaucrats. Where was the inquiring mind of this leader, both in his capacity as Chief Minister and as acting emergency services minister? Where was there then scrutiny of his people?

When it was raised with him why he had failed to take notice of the advice of Mr Cheney, he indicated ignorance of Mr Cheney’s urgent advice of 14 January. He said:

Those comments are news to me.

Either the Chief Minister was monumentally kept in the dark by his bureaucrats about expert opinion and situation reports during the bushfire operation or he has misled this place about Mr Cheney and Mr Cheney’s advice.

I also sincerely believe that he did not “correct any inadvertent error at the earliest opportunity”, to get back to that code of ministerial conduct. If the Chief Minister’s statement that he made to the Assembly on 4 May 2004 is accurate, the discrepancy in his previous 16 months of statements and the phone records proving the contrary was discovered on the evening of Monday, 3 May 2004. Making the public statement about this discrepancy and his misleading of the Assembly at 2.30 pm the next day in relation to the phone calls with Mr Keady is, in no way and in nobody’s language, the earliest opportunity.

The actions of the Chief Minister have clearly and blatantly breached his own ministerial code of conduct that states that the minister who does so “is to resign or to be dismissed”. The actions of the Chief Minister have proven that he did not fulfil his responsibilities as acting minister for emergency services, he did not fulfil his

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