Page 35 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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There is another group that tragically lacked the advantage of hindsight—this city’s heroic and hard-pressed emergency services workers, who could have benefited from a crystal ball in the weeks and days and hours preceding the firestorm. They are the very people that the Leader of the Opposition last week called the Keystone Cops.
I must take the opportunity today to put on the record my deep disappointment at another aspect of the coroner’s report. It concerns the conclusions the coroner drew from some extremely selective quotations from a radio interview I gave on the day the firestorm struck. Excised from their context, the words cited by the coroner in her report create an entirely misleading impression of the broadcast. Essentially, the coroner says that I downplayed the seriousness of the situation on the afternoon of 18 January.
Again, I deeply regret that such a proposition was never put to me when I gave evidence to the inquiry. It was never raised. Had it been, I feel I might have been able to defend myself in a more appropriate forum than the one to which I must resort today. Had such a proposition been put to me, I would have pointed out that a fair and complete reading of the radio transcript shows quite clearly that I recognised the seriousness of the situation confronting Canberra and that I conveyed that seriousness to my fellow Canberrans as best I could.
This accusation is doubly unfair and misleading. It is unfair on one level because the speed of the fires meant that, even as I spoke, my words were being overtaken by events. In the 2CC interview, for example, I did not mention that Mount Stromlo and Duffy were ablaze because it was literally taking place as I spoke. I simply did not know. To suggest that my failure to mention these facts is evidence that I downplayed the seriousness of the fires is like saying that Pliny the Younger downplayed the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79 because he did not understand that Pompeii was being buried as he watched.
The coroner suggests that because I characterised the declaration of a state of emergency as an essentially administrative measure, I deliberately downplayed the seriousness of the fires. Yes, I did characterise the declaration in those words, because they are true. That is what it was. In her highly selective excerpt, the coroner failed to include the rest of my comments. She stopped after the words “essentially an administrative matter”. After I said that was essentially an administrative matter, I went on to say that it “acknowledges the seriousness of the emergency that we are facing and … allows all of the emergency services and particularly the police to take, if they need to, a whole range of emergency steps. It gives them emergency powers. It puts the Chief Police Officer in control of the emergency”.
That is what I said. Read the transcript. The coroner accuses me of downplaying the seriousness of the situation by referring to the declaration of a state of emergency as an administrative matter. I am subject to adverse criticism on the basis of an incomplete reading of the transcript.
I used the word “emergency” five times in my comments. It is true that the information I had at my command as I took part in radio interviews on 18 January was
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