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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1805 ..

When asked about when the matter of failures to report suspected cases of child abuse by the department was brought to his attention, Mr Stanhope was prompted by Ms Gallagher, who had to remind the Chief Minister that he was, in fact, advised on 11 December 2003. However, he told Brendan Smyth on 11 February 2004 that no-one from his department, including the Community Advocate, told him about the problems. In other words, Tim Keady did not tell him. It seems that this is a common problem.

Mr Corbell said on 13 February 2004 that the Community Advocate told him as a result of not one but two annual reports. Apparently, he asked for a brief and was supposedly told that it was being addressed. Can we now truly believe the Chief Minister’s account? Are we now to wonder whether he was told and simply forgot or just did not act? Either way, I believe that the Chief Minister misled the Assembly over this matter. The government surely must have had some concerns about the findings of the committee in regard to a serious failure by the department of family services to adhere to reporting requirements under the act.

The added problem I have in this matter is that the Chief Minister is also the Attorney-General and has complete portfolio carriage of the Office of the Community Advocate. The question therefore is, and always has been: did the Chief Minister actually know about these concerns, or did he conveniently forget that he was told? If he did know, why didn’t he act earlier?

If he did not know, why wasn’t he briefed on such a serious issue by his own department, by his own advisers or by his own ministers, when the OCA’s annual report for two consecutive years highlighted the seriousness of the problem, and again when the government’s response to the August 2003 report was being prepared? Indeed, one might ask: did the Chief Minister have any telephone calls with anyone in regard to the failure of the department over two years to report child abuse, as defined in law? Is this an amazing coincidence, selective amnesia, phoney memory loss, buck-passing, or simply poor leadership?

There seem to be many parallels between this matter and the January 2003 bushfires. Indeed, at the heart of the matter before us today is a telephone call between the Chief Minister and his departmental CEO, Tim Keady, on the morning of 18 January 2003, the day of Canberra’s worst natural disaster in living memory, references to which Jon Stanhope now seems to make light of. The Chief Minister maintains that he still has no memory of the call or what the call was about, citing quite lamely now that he believes that he had or still has some medical problem.

I put it to members that if he does have a serious medical problem that prevents him from remembering specific events, he should seek medical treatment and be discharged from his responsibilities immediately, otherwise how will he respond next time? He should not be Chief Minister if this diagnosis is correct. I suspect, however, that the reference to his so-called unindexed memory was no more than a ruse to avoid accountability.

It must be a matter of grave concern to every member of this place that disclosure and accountability in the future could be virtually destroyed by someone invoking the unindexed memory defence. It would set a new all-time low in parliamentary behaviour. Again, the question to be answered by every member of this place and indeed every

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