Page 72 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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have had good cause to reduce their concern and would understandably have failed to appreciate the gravity of the circumstances that were looming.
I do not for a minute suggest that the Chief Minister deliberately misled people about the severity of the threat. However, under the code of ministerial responsibility he, as the most proximate minister, should have ensured through proactive involvement that he was in a position to provide a warning appropriate to the severity of the situation.
Given limited time, I will make brief mention of the cost. If you draw from the budget papers of 2004-05, the direct territory government costs associated with the event of the bushfires was then estimated at $122.6 million—a significant impact on this economy. And the coroner’s report mentions, and Mr Stefaniak cited, that property losses are estimated at anywhere from $600 million to $1 billion. We will never know the true cost, because so much of this is never going to be quantified.
I raise one final point in the time I have available. One of the main issues that people have raised with me—and indeed they have been critical of my own party, as have I—that stretched credibility in the minds of the ACT community was the extraordinary loss of memory. This is referred to in the coronial report as the apparent loss of corporate memory—some thousand instances of people forgetting things. I draw the Assembly’s attention to page 236 in volume I. Time and time again this Chief Minister, who has a remarkable command for fact and detail, did not remember. The report states:
… Mr Stanhope had no specific recollection of particular words used ...
Mr Stanhope gave evidence that he did not specifically remember reading the sentence in the briefing paper that referred to the potential for the McIntyres Hut fire spotting over containment lines, with “potential serious impact to the ACT forests pines and subsequently the urban area” …
He did not recall discussions relating to the urban periphery and urban firefighters, as reflected in the notes:
Although Mr Stanhope remembered a reference during the Cabinet briefing to Uriarra forest as an asset under threat, he could not remember the threat being quantified as 70 per cent, as recorded in the Tonkin note, and had no memory of numbers such as percentage of assessment of risk being used at all during the briefing.
… Mr Stanhope did not remember a specific discussion around suburbs being at particular risk …
Mr Stanhope was asked whether it was a significant concern to him that one of the things that he was being briefed about was the possibility of a declaration of a state of emergency. His evidence was that it wasn’t a particular concern to him, even though he was unaware of any prior declaration of a state of emergency in the ACT.
That is the summary from the coroner. It is even more galling to go through and read the transcript of evidence.
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