Page 101 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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Mr Stanhope cannot recall his meetings and phone calls about an event that was to become the most disastrous event in the history of Canberra. He cannot remember what he was told about an issue so enormous, so alive and smelly that it would touch every human sense. Really, is he so cynical and arrogant that he would think the people of Canberra would believe that he cannot remember meetings and phone calls about such an enormous issue? What about those briefings and those media conferences and the media reports of 16, 17 and 18 January in the morning? Why wouldn’t they raise doubts? Surely they would raise doubts in the minds of the Chief Minister and his other ministers. They certainly raised doubts in the minds of a lot of people in the community.
I think it is a no-brainer that any Chief Minister worth his salt would be asking questions—and not questions that pussyfoot around that elephant, that huge issue, but to-the-point questions, questions that go to the heart of the matter. And clearly they were not asked.
In those incredible days after 18 January, again the Chief Minister said, “If you want to blame someone, blame me”. I have already said that was a courageous statement. That was written up by Megan Doherty on 1 February 2003. The Chief Minister read out about the context of it. She quoted the Chief Minister as saying, “If somebody wants your neck, if somebody thinks you’ve got to go down, I’ll go with you. We’ll go together.” They were noble statements.
Fast forward to 1 April 2004. Under the Canberra Times headline of “Stanhope backs away from blame”, Megan Doherty said Jon Stanhope “has refused to repeat his promise to resign if an independent authority found any individual should accept responsibility”. But in the same article she quoted him as saying:
If the Coroner comes out and insists that it was all my fault, then, of course, I’ll consider my position seriously.
“I will consider my position seriously.” What does that mean? I think it is a far cry from “blame me” or “I’ll go with you”. Now it has turned into a case of blame the coroner, someone who is just doing her job and doing her job most competently. Clearly, Mr Stanhope’s call to blame him must have been a cynical time-buyer, because he has engaged in vigorous ducking and weaving ever since and especially during the coroner’s inquest. There are things like—and I am paraphrasing—“I had declared a state of emergency, so I was no longer responsible” or “I wasn’t the minister responsible at the time” or, and here I quote from the report, “I had not received advice that led me to believe that this fire would destroy property within the suburbs of Canberra.”
At the end of the day, Mr Speaker, the buck stops with him. The Chief Minister is ultimately responsible and he was right when he said, “Blame me.” He was responsible for the safety and security of the people of the ACT and he can duck and weave all he likes but he cannot escape that fact or its consequences. This was the worst disaster in Canberra’s history. It and the bungling and obfuscation that followed it will go down in history as one of those events that will still have heads shaking in amazement for many years to come.
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