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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Thursday, 24 June 2004) . . Page.. 2602 ..

thumb their noses at the rules regarding misleading the Assembly. The credibility of the Assembly is also open to attack if we do not take strong action against those who deliberately mislead and refuse to correct.

Mr Speaker, this is a serious matter. This is a serious motion that I have thought long and hard about bringing on. The first example of Mr Corbell’s pattern of misleading relates to psychiatric nursing scholarships. On 29 March this year, Mr Speaker, I announced the Canberra Liberal’s policy on mental health. One of the components of the policy was the provision of $75,000 to fund five scholarships for psychiatric nursing. Minister Corbell, in a media release later that day in response to the policy, stated:

This government has undertaken a comprehensive 18 months consultation with carers and consumers towards developing a Mental Health Action Plan that will shortly be released. It already provides $300,000 for mental health nursing scholarships and committed money to universities to build facilities to train and educate future medical practitioners.

He later reinforced this claim in the Assembly, on 30 March 2004, when he stated:

It is interesting, Mr Speaker, that Mr Smyth thinks that we need some mental health nursing scholarships. We agree with him, which is why we funded them in our last budget. The sum of $300,000 went into that. Mr Smyth, in comparison, is proposing only $100,000.

When questioned in the Estimates Committee on 7 April 2004 about the provenance of the $300,000 for mental health nursing scholarships, Mr Corbell stated:

From advice, that occurred in the January 2002 appropriation.

Mr Speaker, this funding is not in the January 2002 appropriation. In fact, there was no appropriation in January 2002. There was one in February, but there was no money in the February appropriation, Appropriation Bill (No 3) 2001-2002, for scholarships of this kind or, indeed, scholarships of any kind. Nor was there, as Mr Corbell claimed in the Assembly, mental health scholarships in the last budget, the 2003-04 budget. This funding is not in the budget before that, the 2002-03 budget, or in any supplementary appropriation brought by the Stanhope government.

The only reference to nursing scholarships of any kind, let alone mental health ones, in any Hansard since the change of government is a passing reference in the Estimates Committee hearing of 30 July 2002. I’ll actually read from the transcript, if I may. A public servant was answering:

Mr Foster: … We directed some money from nursing scholarships out to Calvary. We had held some money centrally for scholarships, so we directed $200,000 to Calvary for that.

MRS DUNNE: That’s not part of the 4.7 for throughput?

Mr Foster: It is. It was part of the—

MRS DUNNE: The scholarship money?

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