Page 2269 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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in writing by Nic Manikis; a refusal to accept that the government would act honourably and in accordance with the Freedom of Information legislation in relation to the release of documents. There is no such document. The government has never received any such advice. Those are the facts. As painful as those facts are to Mr Seselja and his lovely little conspiracy theory, those are the facts. There is no such document. There is no lack of integrity. There is no non-application of the Freedom of Information Act. There is no refusal to provide the committee with the documents that it sought—none.
Mr Corbell: A pretty basic error.
MR STANHOPE: A very basic error, a Boston Legal type error—the sort of stuff that we see litigated through Boston Legal. You are simply wrong, Mr Seselja, and we will see what you are made of in your response to that fact. The matter is quite simple.
Mr Corbell: Stand up and correct the record.
Mr Seselja: Which part am I correcting?
MR STANHOPE: All of it.
Mr Seselja: All of it?
MR STANHOPE: You have made a shocking series of miscalculations, wrong assumptions and false allegations in relation to this. Keep pursuing it, mate, to your heart’s content. You are wrong—dig the hole deeper. You are making and have made a fool of yourself, and I can produce all the evidence to the effect that you are just wrong. This is a very simple issue. I guess when you go looking for conspiracies you think you are onto something hot. You take your eye off the ball, you make a whole range of assumptions, jump in head first, make a complete goose of yourself and this is where you end up.
I simply wanted an assurance that every possible non-urban site in the possession of the ACT government that might potentially be a reasonable location for an indigenous-specific drug rehabilitation facility was investigated. It was the strong wish and desire of the indigenous people of the ACT to have a non-urban centre for what they refer to as a bush healing farm, a process or a notion that we have been pursuing, or an indigenous-specific drug rehabilitation facility.
In my strong desire to deal with one of the most pressing issues facing indigenous people within the ACT—namely, to deal with the high levels of addiction within that community—I sought to identify a site. In the context of being advised that there was a site—and it only came to my attention because I saw it in a brief in relation to activities of the Land Development Agency and land that it was in the process of identifying and releasing to the market; I would not have known it existed but for that—I said, “Has this been investigated?” I can tell you exactly what happened. I said, “Has this site”—which I did not know existed or was available for other purposes—“been investigated as a site for an indigenous-specific drug rehabilitation facility?” I was told no.
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