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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1840 ..

pressing issues to the high standard required of a minister. He failed, so he tells us, to seek briefings or communicate with his officials during his brief time as the acting minister.

He failed to return phone calls on the most important day in the history of that particular ministerial job. And he failed in his public role as a leader and as a communicator in a time of crisis. Since that time, it appears that he has left public servants in the unfair position of needing to lose their own memories—not to mention diaries and notes—to avoid contradicting their minister. This degradation of the public service deserves more scrutiny than it has had to date.

Today Mr Stanhope has relied on his memory loss as a complete defence to explain what happened. He has created another new political concept in his attempt to explain away misleading the ACT Assembly—a claim that he had lost his unindexed memories. But it is a loss of unindexed memories that is apparently selective. His unindexed memories plea lets him cast away key information and therefore escape accountability to the Assembly. He says he was traumatised. But was he really so traumatised?

We know that he has basked in the positive media coverage of his involvement in the helicopter incident. He can recite his actions that day whenever he wants to repeat them to the media. We are already searching for meeting notes, the diaries and the phone records—and now we need to search also for Jon Stanhope’s memory index. Why is it that only Jon Stanhope has lost his memory index when many other Canberrans are able to give their recollections to the coroner? Is it quite simply all too convenient? While we are debating this, the public can only become more and more disappointed with the low standard to which politicians will stoop.

Jon Stanhope will go down in history for this. He has given politicians around the world a whole new way of avoiding scrutiny. In fact, this new concept has enormous potential to undermine the whole system of the parliamentary control of governments. From now on politicians will just claim, “I’ve lost my memory index.” It could become a complete immunity not just against important votes of no confidence but also to help ministers avoid ever having to be held to account through regular parliamentary questioning.

I commit the Liberal Party to rejecting the technique, which will seriously corrupt accountability to this Assembly. I urge the crossbench MLAs to weigh this up very seriously. They must not align themselves with this development. This defence seems particularly crafted to impress Ms Tucker, who is on the record as suggesting to the media that she might let Mr Stanhope off on the grounds of trauma induced memory loss. Mr Stanhope is repeating back to Ms Tucker what he expects will most likely impress her.

The Chief Minister’s speech has totally sidestepped the need for ministers to be accountable and honest. He has shown no recognition of the vital principle that parliament must not be misled. In the past ministers have accepted that they need to resign when it is revealed that they have misled parliament. There is no such recognition by Jon Stanhope of such centuries of parliamentary tradition in which parliaments protected their authority very strictly by demanding real and effective accountability.

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