Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1820 ..

many ways. During his speech he built a case and used the term “we can only speculate”. And boy, did we speculate! The whole case was built on invention.

So let us go through some of the inventions incorporated in the case that Mr Smyth put and to which his partners in the opposition added nothing. Invention No 1 relates to the call of Mr Castle on the Friday night. Six seconds: Mr Smyth exhorted us to look at our watches, watch the sweep hand and realise that six seconds is a long time and a lot of information can be transferred in that time. Let me tell you, Mr Smyth, I rang Mr Stanhope’s mobile phone at lunchtime today. By the time the greeting was completed and the beep went to start the message, six seconds had elapsed. In fact, Mr Smyth, it was not possible. If you had thought about it, if you had done your homework, you would have realised that a message could not have been left on a six-second phone call. But don’t let that concern you. You have actually peddled into the public forum that message about Mr Castle’s call to Mr Stanhope. Well, he could not have left a message. But don’t let that stay your hand. What we had from that was, “There must have been a reply phone call.” So we then invented—invention No 2—a call between Mr Stanhope and Mr Castle arising from the message that could not have happened.

Invention No 3 was the content of the Keady discussion with Mr Stanhope on Saturday morning. Must have been—there was a firestorm later that day; someone must have foreseen it. Two of your guys were down the coast; they were working off the information that was given through the media. And isn’t it possible that Mr Stanhope was receiving the same material that the media was receiving? I think you have to at least admit the possibility that what Mr Castle was saying at 9 pm in his interview to the Canberra Times and what was published in the paper—Megan Doherty, published in the paper on Saturday morning; Mr Castle’s information, 9 pm Friday, three hours after the non-message on Friday evening—was not a message of panic. But somehow you could invent that.

There were assurances coming out of the Emergency Services Bureau on Saturday morning and I would have thought it is distinctly possible that reassurances were still given on the Saturday morning. I cannot speculate, and I will not speculate, on what was in the call that Mr Stanhope made to Mr Keady, but what I can say is that it is highly unlikely that this was a call of emergency, and the events that occurred beyond that followed. There is no motivation—this is one of those cases that have no motivation.

Let us go to invention No 4. Mr Smyth was then able to tell us what happened at the cabinet meeting, and that the cabinet meeting should have caused panic. Well, I was at the cabinet meeting and, ladies and gentlemen, you have my word—

Mrs Dunne: You are just as complacent as everybody else.

Mr Pratt: That’s what you get—

Mrs Dunne: You are just as complacent as the rest of them.

MR SPEAKER: Order members! Mr Quinlan has the floor. Please, Mr Quinlan, direct your comments through the chair.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .