Page 100 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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could have been saved. Perhaps some more houses could have been saved. Assets could have been deployed better than they were.
Why didn’t you do it? The salient date is 16 January 2003. But it is more than that. A lot could have happened since then, and a sensible, competent government and sensible competent ministers surely would have done that. You had done that in December 2001 and you did not do it this time, in a situation even on 16 January when Ted Quinlan felt it was at least as bad—maybe not any more—and it sure as hell got a hell of a lot worse after that. So I think those are some very damming comments. The Chief Minister tried to wriggle out of it, but he could not quite manage to wriggle out of that at all in relation to that.
Comments were made as to why Mr Corbell was not called before the coroner. Mr Corbell, I was not called before the coroner in relation to the hospital implosion. Mr Madden only called the Chief Minister. Coroner Doogan only called the Chief Minister here. It seems to be fairly normal practice and it is perhaps because they are the chief minister. In an inquest like that there are people representing all sorts of parties and they ask all sorts of questions and it does not necessarily mean, Mr Corbell, that the magistrate has to get in there and ask questions. So that is a particularly spurious point; in fact, I think you made a whole series of spurious points today.
Last Sunday morning I read the Canberra Sunday Times and saw an interesting article by Ian Warden, who talked about “the elephant in the room”, which he said referred to occasions when almost anyone present is aware of it and thinking about it but for some reason can’t talk about such an enormous issue. Maybe that is one of the reasons for this memory lapse, these different accounts of what actually occurred, the fact that there did seem to be a paralysis from 16 January in relation to certain things. It might be simply that nothing was actually said at all, and it seems that is probably the case from what we see in the evidence, that very few questions were asked; people sat around staring, unable to talk, because of this elephant, this enormous issue that was the Canberra firestorm.
So we might be indebted to Mr Warden for his unintended explanation. But he goes on to say that an elephant, like a skeleton, cannot be hidden in the closet; it is too big. He says it is so enormous, so alive and smelly and trumpeting and so dramatically incontinent, that the pretence that it is not there requires a degree of extreme pretence not required in the ignoring of a shy, tight-lipped skeleton; in other words, it is a rebuttal of the age-old myth that if you ignore it it will go away.
And the firestorm did not go away; it killed four people; it destroyed nearly 500 homes. And, despite what the government and the Chief Minister might want to do, they cannot put this enormous issue back in the closet. It will not go away. It will certainly not go away for the families of the four people who died, for the people who lost their homes or indeed for the whole community of Canberra, because we are all affected in some way. Everyone will forever remember that day—where they were, what they did, who they were with, what they saw—
Mrs Burke: Most people will.
MR STEFANIAK: Most people, indeed—what they tasted, what they smelt.
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