Page 2608 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 2 July 2008
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they will be embarrassed, and they will not because there will be several reputations on the government benches that will be destroyed by this, particularly that of the Deputy Chief Minister as a result of her far-reaching statement that there is not a single document.
If Mr Stanhope has nothing to hide, why has he refused to release over 1,500 pages of documents held by his department on this issue? Of the 1,754 pages of documents initially admitted to by the Chief Minister’s Department on the issue, the opposition initially only received 239. Of those, 105 had been heavily attacked by the censor, so much so that they had become nothing more useful than blank pages. Subsequent to the 1,754 pages that were initially made available to the opposition, CMD found another 168 documents—surprise, surprise. It blacked out the text on 70 of those documents and entirely suppressed another 18 documents. They got caught out at the first hurdle, they fell at the second hurdle, and they collapsed at the water jump.
Mr Stanhope’s own department is by far the worst offender in failing to release documents under FOI. It has been far worse than ACTPLA or the LDA, which suggests to me and, I think, to all others that it is the Chief Minister himself who has the most to hide. Perhaps when the Chief Minister made her statement that the opposition would—
Ms Gallagher: Deputy, mate.
MR SMYTH: Well, Chief Minister one day. You know the pre-sets on the computers; we all heard about that. Perhaps the Deputy Chief Minister said the opposition will not be able to prove in any way, in any document, that there was any improper involvement, or ultimately that the government took decisions around this project specifically about where it was because they talked with her. Maybe she was saying what she thought was the truth, because the Chief Minister had not told anybody. When the Deputy Chief Minister makes a contribution to this debate, I hope she can tell us how she knows there was nothing in these documents. Has she seen them all? Has she read them all? Has she viewed them all? Have her staff seen them all, read them all, viewed them all? Has her department seen them all, read them all, viewed them all? If the Deputy Chief Minister cannot say that that is the case, then she has to tell us the validity of that statement when she made it. If she has not read them, she cannot know, and it goes to her credibility. It goes to her ability to look people in the eye and say that this government had no hand in this.
We know that a number of key documents have been suppressed, such as the 9 May 2007 letter from John Mackay, Chief Executive of ActewAGL, as well as his letter of 16 August 2007. We know that the letters attached to the briefing that I have just quoted from that the Chief Minister signed off on 18 July 2007 were later given to the opposition, but it was very, very late in the day. Indeed, they were given to the opposition on the Monday evening before the Wednesday debate of no confidence at 4.57 in the evening, hoping someone would not notice that they had sneaked them into the office.
Mr Stanhope has not been telling the public the truth about what he released. He said:
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