Page 2688 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 16 August 2005

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sense that it would cause real prejudice to the outcome of the trial or inquest; that the danger of the prejudice must be weighed against the public interest in the matters under discussion; and that the danger of prejudice is greater when a matter is actually before a magistrate or a jury. It should be noted that magistrates undertake the duties of a coroner in the ACT.

I therefore ask members to be mindful of this issue when making comments in the Assembly on these matters and I will rule that, in relation to matters still before the coroner, members should restrain their comments about the cause of death of the four persons involved.

MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra) (10.33): I move:

That this Assembly:

(1) censures the Attorney-General for his:

(a) obstructing the Coronial Inquest into the January 2003 bushfires leading to an unnecessary 10-month delay in its processes;

(b) unprecedented and inappropriate initiating/joining of the action to disqualify Coroner Doogan;

(d) his general mishandling of the various inquiries into the bushfire; and

(2) calls on the Attorney-General to:

(e) table by close of business today, the legal advice(s) that he relied on in initiating and/or joining the appeal against Coroner Doogan; and

(f) stand aside as Attorney-General until the Coronial Inquest has been completed.

The Chief Minister and Attorney-General is a man who likes to be the first to do things. It is a guaranteed way, I suppose, of getting into the history books. You might call it the Guinness Book of Records approach to politics. He certainly did it again when he chose to appeal against the coroner appointed to conduct the inquiry into the Canberra fires of January 2003. But along with most of the other firsts to which this Attorney-General lays claim, the opposition feels no envy at all. In fact we feel something more like shame.

The first we are discussing in this censure motion is, of course, the Attorney-General’s joining of a legal action against his own coroner. This is entirely unprecedented in Australia. Coronial experts such as Dr Ian Freckleton have commented that they cannot remember a time when an attorney-general or a government has taken such action. Indeed Dr Freckleton said, speaking on ABC radio, on 2 November last year:

The role of coroner basically lies between the civil and the criminal jurisdictions. The coroner’s basic role is to find out what brought about the tragedy and what can be done about it to fix it. The role of the coroner is an “ancient lineage”. What has

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