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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Thursday, 24 June 2004) . . Page.. 2720 ..

“Ministers should take reasonable steps to ensure the factual content of statements they make…and that they correct any inadvertent error at the earliest possible opportunity.”

I would like to speak about the issue that has been talked about here—that is, the forensic centre. It really is not about the forensic centre; it is about what the minister said about what Mr Smyth said. Mr Hargreaves or Mr Wood said that this is about Mr Corbell’s misquoting a Liberal Party policy statement. I am sorry: it is not. It is about Mr Corbell’s saying that something that he said Mr Smyth said was in the record of this place. That is the crux of the matter. So that there is no mistake about it, I will quote from page 1,276 of Hansard of 30 March. It says:

This is an interesting policy direction from the opposition. The reason for that is that earlier this year the opposition’s spokesperson on health advocated this sort of facility should be part of the hospital.

These are the important words:

I quote him from Hansard:

There are facilities. The key is the caseload. We—

that is the Liberal Party—

would establish a time-out facility and make sure there is a forensic unit as part of the hospital.

That is the end of the quote. Mr Corbell goes on to say that this is what he said only a couple of months ago. We probably would not be here today talking about this, except that Mr Corbell said the words are “from Hansard”. By saying “from Hansard” he actually fabricated the record of this place. Mr Speaker, that is seriously misleading this place. Mr Smyth has come into this place on a couple of occasions and said, “I can’t find where I was supposed to have said it in Hansard. The Hansard people can’t find it and I couldn’t find it in Hansard”. Mr Corbell has not come into this place tonight and said, “This is the page in Hansard. I will read it out to you from Hansard.” Until he can do that, he has perpetuated the misleading of this Assembly.

Mr Corbell has come in here tonight and said, “I read from some notes which turned out to be notes that a journalist gave me.” Mr Corbell said that he was quoting what Mr Smyth said from Hansard. Mr Smyth gave him the opportunity on a number of occasions to correct the record and he has not done it—and that is the problem. Mr Smyth, in April, said, “Perhaps the minister would like to correct the record.” He asked the minister to correct the record because he had done a search, his staff had done a search and he had asked Hansard to do a search. If those words from Hansard were not there, there would have been a “he said, she said” argy-bargy argument about it and it would have been political point scoring. But this is not political point scoring. It is not about whether the minister is a good Minister for Health or a good Minister for Planning or whether he has great vision and great energy. No-one denies that, Mr Speaker, and I did not deny it when we talked about planning issues last night.

The minister is a man of vision. He does do things, but sometimes he does them the wrong way. When the opportunities arise for him to fix it, he does not fix it. On 1 April,

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