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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1808 ..

happening in governments and bureaucracies around Australia over the past 10 years with regard to bushfire fuel management.

I believe that things could have gone differently and that if things had gone differently we might have been in a better position to warn people, lives could have been saved, and memories could have been saved. But within that personal anger that I feel and that personal sadness that I feel, I must focus on the question before us, that is, whether or not the Chief Minister holds our confidence.

The coroner has been tasked with investigating the January 2003 bushfires. It is a legal, court-based process. Even today there is more evidence being presented to the coroner from the chief of police operations and, from what I have heard, that evidence is incredibly interesting. In fact, all of the evidence that the coroner has been hearing over the past number of weeks has been revealing in some way. It has shown up some great failings and some very interesting discussions about what was actually happening around those January 2003 bushfires.

The coroner has a role to consider all the evidence, to sift through the different recollections, the different minutes and the different reports and chronologies, and to reach to the best of her ability the truth of what happened. This is a parliamentary assembly; it is not a court. We do not have all the evidence in relation to some of the serious allegations that have been made today.

To address quickly the allegations made this morning by members in relation to Red Hill: today was the first time I heard those allegations. If I were a court, I would have called witnesses to hear more evidence in relation to them. I fully believe that those allegations should be referred to the coroner. But we have not heard from the men named about whether they were actually up on Red Hill. We could call them, we could make them stand at the bar, but there is a coroner’s process in train and it is for the coroner’s process to look at that.

To focus again on whether the Chief Minister holds my confidence, let us look at the main question in relation to misleading the Assembly and the community. I went back and looked at Hansard over the last 16 months as to what the Chief Minister had said and I looked at what he had said to the community through the media. I refer members to the interview of him that was broadcast on 23 April on Stateline. The Chief Minister was asked:

What would have happened if you didn’t think to go off on your own bat to the Bureau?

The Chief Minister replied:

Well, I think that’s an interesting point, as at that stage officials—and there’s a question to be asked there, why I hadn’t been contacted of course, and I don’t have the answer to that, but having said that, officials were doing what they could at that stage, and they were making the decisions that they felt appropriate at that time.

The Chief Minister went on to say in the same interview:

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