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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1828 ..

pick places that had pet enclosures? It was not to evacuate people from farms because, I suspect, in the main they would have left the animals on the farms. They had pet enclosures because they were going to evacuate people from suburbs so that they could bring their pets—at 9.30. And, of course, we have got the Red Cross on standby.

So at the 9.30 meeting, Barbara Baikie outlined the community recovery strategy that had the Red Cross on standby for the national registration and inquiry system. Tim Keady is in this meeting or has just left this meeting at 10.09. It started at 9.30. This fairly detailed list goes on. I suspect the meeting went for some time; I do not think they would have knocked it off too quickly. But Tim Keady does not mention any of this. Keady himself said in his evidence to the coroner that he told the Chief Minister on Monday night of last week that they would have been about serious issues; they would not have been about trivial issues. The serious issues are recorded in the minutes.

Apparently fabrication No 4 is about the cabinet meeting. Ted said, “I did not say panic.” Mr Quinlan attributes to us that we have said everybody was panicking. I do not think I have used the word “panic”. I would have to check, but nobody gave the impression that the cabinet panicked. But what we have got are the words written down by the record-takers. “Forty to 60 per cent chance of a state of emergency.” Okay? And then we get to the state of emergency excuse. Initially they said, “The first we’d heard about the state of emergency was 2 to 2.30 on Saturday the 18th.” But when it was revealed—which is misleading, because it was said in this place, Mr Speaker—that they had actually discussed states of emergency in the cabinet meeting, the extraordinary cabinet meeting of the 16th, “It wasn’t about fires, it was about power lines. We were going to have a blackout—a big blackout.”

Canberra has got four 330,000-kv cables that supply it. There are the Yass to Canberra line, the Tumut to Canberra line, the Talbingo to Canberra line and the South Coast to Canberra line. Two of those lines were at risk. All right. The fear, as proposed by the government, was: we were going to have an 80 per cent blackout. All four powerlines come into the substation at Holt or Macgregor, depending on which street you live in and how you view the thing. Right? For there to be an 80 per cent blackout in the ACT the substation had to go. I can assure you, if that substation is burning, Holt and Macgregor are burning. So if there was a need for a state of emergency it was because the suburbs of Macgregor and Holt were at least on fire.

The excuse was: there is going to be so much carbon up in the air the power lines are going to be arcing. The power lines were arcing already. On the day of the fires, on 18 January, the lines from Tumut and Talbingo tripped several times but came straight back online. So there was no noticeable interruption to supply. The only way there could have been an 80 per cent power failure in the ACT was if the Macgregor substation was on fire, and for it to be on fire Macgregor and Holt were burning as well. Hence the case is proved. The fire was going to impact the suburbs. So their denial just does not stand.

Now the fifth one Mr Quinlan raised is Red Hill on which, of course, the Chief Minister has spoken to him. It is interesting that the stories that we have received vary. Some people said they saw Peter Lucas-Smith, some people said they had seen Mike Castle. We have now heard from the Chief Minister that those two gentlemen and Mr Bennett were there. People get confused, I assume. The information relayed to us, from two

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