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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1818 ..

This is what ministerial responsibility is about. It is making sure that communication is open, and what we have seen today, laid out by Mr Smyth, is a whole range of material that ensured that nobody told anybody, and if they did, they have shut up about it.

When a minister says, “I relied on my memory and it must be incomplete or un-indexed,” we have to be prepared to say, “Well, you should have kept records and you should have consulted them.” We should not be prepared to accept qualified answers to questions when records exist or ought to exist. We have to treat failing to ask the question as seriously as asking the question and failing to act on the answer, because in doing this we are addressing what might be called the Bill Clinton class of dishonesty—the attempt to mislead people without telling outright lies for moral or Machiavellian reasons.

The second reason for not allowing the Stanhope defence deals with a less subtle dishonesty. In practice, the great problem with accepting, “I didn’t know, I wasn’t told,” and especially, “I don’t remember,” as an excuse is that it is simply too easy to lie about it.

Ministers wield a great deal of power in our system, but with great power comes great responsibility. There are widespread concerns expressed by people on both sides of politics, and those on neither, about the increasing politicisation of the public service. If we accept the Stanhope defence, we can expect it to spread through this territory like Patterson’s curse. We will have given every minister, every staffer and every public servant an unlimited get-out-of-jail-free card. It will say, “I can’t remember.” The Chief Minister seems to imagine that if he prefaces every statement with “as far as I can recall,” he can never be accused of misleading. You just need to say, if caught out, “Whoops, I made a mistake but at least I didn’t tell a lie, I don’t think.” Do we really want every answer to every question without notice to be prefaced by “as far as I can recall”?

The reality is that if a minister says, “no-one told me” or “I never asked” or “the notes were lost,” we will almost never be able to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he is lying. We will almost never know if the notes had been lost on his instruction. We will not know if public servants who also cannot remember are telling the truth, covering up for their minister out of loyalty, or are just being instructed to blatantly lie.

Given this, there are two choices. We can demand conclusive evidence of a conspiracy before action is taken, and we know that if we demand written evidence of a conspiracy we will simply create a culture where nothing is written down. This will relieve us of the stress of penalising people, and after a time it will no longer be worthwhile even to ask questions about the propriety of ministerial actions. Ministerial action will go unchecked. Or we can do the courageous thing: we can do what we are paid to do. We can take the view that in terms of the public interest, a minister who genuinely does not know what is going on, who does not ask the difficult questions, even through incompetence or a desire to avoid incriminating evidence, is just as bad, absolutely as bad, as one who has the information but lies about it.

Mr Speaker, we have had a lot of evidence put before us today. A lot of material has been put forward by the members of the crossbench and members of the opposition. But the Chief Minister, the only person who has spoken on behalf of the government, did not

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