Page 98 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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First up is the question of ministerial responsibility, which Mr Corbell and, I think, Ms Gallagher mentioned. Ms Gallagher quoted things I had said in a previous debate, as I quoted statements from Mr Stanhope that we say he should adhere to today. Yes, Ms Gallagher, ministers should not be responsible for errors made by members of their department, especially if they are down the chain and the minister does not have any direct actual responsibility. I have no problems with that.
I am not for a moment saying, for example, that this Chief Minister should resign because of errors made on 8 January 2003 and 9 January 2003. Gross as they may be in terms of not putting out fires, which experienced firefighters will tell you could have been put out, he would not have the requisite knowledge for that. No-one would expect him necessarily to go against advice there. But by God they would expect him to do the right thing in relation to what occurred at the cabinet meeting on 16 January 2003.
Why was that meeting called? I think my colleague Mr Smyth went into that in some detail in his speech. How often are these emergency cabinet meetings called? Not very often. I can recall one we had in relation to some crisis with TransACT in the seven years of government. I cannot even recall a cabinet meeting in relation to a crisis in government over the budget when we looked like having our budget knocked off, as a minority government, over the shooting galleries. I recall being rung up in Wollongong at about 7.30 on the Sunday night by Chief Minister Kate Carnell about that one. But we did not have an emergency cabinet meeting.
Emergency cabinet meetings are there for crises—and this was a crisis. You attacked the coroner. I think Mr Seselja has summarised this very, very well in terms of the debate generally. He says the Chief Minster has conveniently forgotten potentially incriminating discussions while claiming to remember exculpatory discussions. And that is exactly what has occurred in relation to the cabinet meeting. We are talking about witness credibility here. The Chief Minister, all of a sudden, has these amazing memory recurrences as to what happened. He recalls that he did not say that, and this did or did not occur in cabinet, and that there was no way that cabinet was given this impression.
The coroner sits there as the finder of fact. Her job, every day of the week as a magistrate, is to go through and sift through the evidence. She is there to find on the evidence what is fact and what is not, and no-one opposite has expressed today any notion of why the coroner would improperly find fact. Why would she exercise the bias that you still seem to be suggesting that she did? You delayed the inquest for a year with spurious claims of bias, which were thrown out by the Supreme Court. You have now attacked the coroner when you found that she finds against you and makes these damming statements of the Chief Minister and these damming statements of the government.
We have heard evidence here today, again from the report, that strangely no-one in government asked too many questions. “Oh, that was interesting; there is a bit of a threat here.” But very few questions were asked about that. That is where you failed. No-one expects you to have the knowledge of a firefighter. No one expects the Chief Minister necessarily to be able to say, “Why don’t you put those fires out—go on, go
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