Page 4053 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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other developers are the basis of the campaign which Mr Seselja and the Liberal Party in this place have run.
The campaign that you have run, that there is not a level playing field, that the government, through its agencies, provides preferential information and preferential treatment to preferred developers for preferred developments is absolutely scandalous. That was the environment that you have created. Austexx is a major national company prepared to buy land in the Australian Capital Territory for the first time. In its first investment, its first foray into the territory, it was prepared to bid $39 million—
Mrs Dunne: And your planning minister stuffed it up!
MR SPEAKER: Order, Mrs Dunne!
MR STANHOPE: It was prepared to invest $100 million on that site and prepared to employ hundreds of Canberrans in its business. And you think it is okay to put that at risk! Have you asked yourselves what Austexx think of the ACT now as a result of the exposure that you have forced on them, the suggestion that you have made that they were party to the receipt of preferential treatment, that this is how they as a business, as an organisation, as a significant national company disport themselves? You might think all is fair in politics, that you can say and do whatever you like about the government and its agencies, but you did not hesitate to draw into this web a significant national company, Austexx.
All is not fair in politics. Be under no apprehension that the officers within those organisations, within the LDA and ACTPLA, are not an identifiable group. You cannot cast aspersions on those organisations and pretend to yourselves that they are amorphous organisations, that you are not identifying anybody by name and therefore it does not matter. There is a group of officials within ACTPLA and within the LDA who were exclusively devoted to this project. They are an identifiable group. They know who Dr Foskey means when she calls them incompetent or corrupt—something that Dr Foskey dismisses as simply her doing her job. Let us not actually trick ourselves with fancy legal words like “malfeasance”. The definition of malfeasance in Butterworths Australian Legal Dictionary is:
The doing of a wrongful act, whether a tort or a crime.
It is the commission of a crime. Dr Foskey, you cannot seriously suggest that it is appropriate, in correspondence, without a single shred of substantiating evidence, to refer to officers within ACTPLA and the LDA as incompetent or corrupt. You do not name anybody; nevertheless you identify those officers. They can self-identify and they are identified by their peers in those organisations. Dr Foskey uses the classic line: “I just wanted to know what the facts were. Auditor-General, I think officers in the LDA or in ACTPLA are either incompetent or corrupt. They are one or the other.” We have now discovered through the Auditor-General that they are not corrupt. In the eyes of Dr Foskey, they are simply incompetent; there is nowhere else for her to go.
They are not incompetent or corrupt, and the fact that you leave that allegation on the record is quite disgraceful. These public servants, these human beings, have been affronted and defamed—I believe in an actionable way—by your suggestion that they
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