Page 93 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.00): If I can paraphrase what the government seem to be putting forward as their defence today, it seems to be that it is unbelievable that they would not have done anything; therefore they were not told. That is what they are resting on: “We did not do anything, so it is quite clear that we weren’t told.” The second defence is that what the coroner and the opposition have said is littered with inaccuracies. Yet, if we look at Ms Gallagher’s speech and the speeches of government members today, they are the ones that are inaccurate.
Let us go to the heart of this. The defence seems to be that the cabinet meeting did not discuss these issues. I have to ask: how many special, unscheduled cabinet meetings have you participated in, Deputy Chief Minister? None. You were on leave. You missed that one. You were lucky. The answer is that very, very rarely will cabinet come together out of schedule, and only on very important issues. So all of the ministers that were in town, whether they were on leave or not, on the Thursday morning attended a meeting that had been called because somebody thought it was important enough to have an unscheduled cabinet meeting.
Then we are told they did not discuss anything of import. That is unbelievable and the most unlikely thing to have ever happened. To quote Mark Twain: truth is stranger than fiction. The truth here is that the cabinet was told. The truth is that the cabinet did not have the wherewithal to do anything with what it was told. The truth is that the government went on leave. The truth is that they all thought it would happen on Monday, because that was to be the 40-year event: “Monday is the day, so we can actually have the weekend off.” That was the indifferent attitude of the government.
The truth is that Jon Stanhope was indifferent to the people of Canberra and went AWOL for 15 hours. He was absent without leave, just as he is absent without leave now. It is traditional that people who are the subject of these motions sit through them—and he has been absent for most of the afternoon.
How do we know that the meeting was important? Because we had the evidence given by the head of JACS. Mr Keady generally had a poor recollection of the details, but he said in his evidence it was his idea to brief cabinet because:
… we were already aware that we had a very serious situation on our hands. It was certainly the worst that had occurred in my time in Canberra and it seemed as bad or worse than anyone else could recall. To the extent that the suggestion has been made here that the situation is very serious and likely to get worse, I think we were already aware of that.
Why was there a cabinet meeting? It was because the situation was serious, the worst in living memory. No-one could believe that anything worse had ever happened or that the potential for anything worse had ever happened, but when the Chief Minister agreed to a cabinet meeting these matters were not discussed. I am not sure what they did; they might have played tiddlywinks or cards or talked about the weather: “We did not discuss the flames you could see on the hill or the smoke in the air or the reports in the papers. We had a special cabinet meeting to discuss nothing.”
Mr Keady said that the purpose of the briefing paper prepared for the cabinet meeting that apparently did not tell the government anything, and the discussion that followed,
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