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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1816 ..

What really deserves the naming rights, though, has been the Chief Minister’s original work in raising amnesia to an art form. If you say, “no-one told me”, then, given the inconvenience of modern phone records, you may be shown to be, if not deliberately lying, at least wrong or at least misleading. But if you say, “I can’t remember being told” then no-one can give you the lie. The advantage of this approach is that it leads discussion away from the realms of fact and record and into areas where there is no hard data available.

When queried about briefings or meetings, the response is that the information content has been lost, often literally, and all that remains is the impression of alarm, anxiety, concern or complacency. So we are reduced to a debate based on the Chief Minister’s emotional state and, as it turns out, the Chief Minister is no less at sea than the rest of us when it comes to his emotional state. He, too, is reduced to guess work.

Based on his actions, he says, “I can’t remember but I can’t have been very alarmed or I would have done something.” This means that when phone records revealed he had received phone messages and had spoken for 6¾ minutes to at least one person who might have been expected to tell him about the situation, he could easily switch to the Stanhope defence, mark 2—“Well maybe I did but I say I can’t remember the conversation and you can’t prove differently.” As we know, the Chief Minister has also consistently stated that he is not an expert, that he did not have operational control—the implication being that he would not have known about the risks unless someone told him.

What is wrong with the Stanhope defence? First, being a minister, and particularly the Chief Minister, is a privilege not a right. An investigation into the conduct of a minister does not proceed on the same assumption as a criminal trial or even a coroners court. Our society places such value on individual liberty that we deem it better to let 99 guilty men go free than imprison one innocent man. If there is reasonable doubt of the defendant’s guilt, he is acquitted.

Contrary to what Ms Dundas said, this place is a court. This is the highest court in this territory. But here, the person who is on trial is the highest public office holder in this territory, and we do not have the same standards for the holders of high public office. Ministers are acting on behalf of citizens. We do not want a minister to remain in office because there is a chance that he may not be corrupt, dishonest, negligent or even incompetent. We may not even want our territory to be run by people who are probably not corrupt, probably not dishonest or probably not negligent. The principle here is not the right of a minister to hold office but the right of a citizen to be governed by someone who is at least honest and basically competent.

The second problem with the Stanhope defence concerns the doctrine of ministerial responsibility, and many have spoken about this here today. Ministerial responsibility does not mean that ministers, like other mortals, are responsible for their direct actions. For one thing, even ordinary mortals are responsible for what they fail to do. There seems to be a common belief, especially popular in this government, that sins of omission are somehow less serious than sins of commission; almost, it seems, a belief that if you do nothing you will not get it wrong and you will not get into trouble. If you

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