Page 2723 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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Indeed, it was put to him:
Do you think it is reasonable, Chief Minister, that you spend taxpayers’ money on an advertisement because you were annoyed about an article?
The Chief Minister said.
Well, that would be unreasonable, Mr Seselja.
Then he goes on:
That would be completely unreasonable for anybody to do that.
But then of course we saw the email which showed that that is exactly what happened, that the Chief Minister, in his own words, did act unreasonably. This is the bar that he is setting; he is setting the standard so low; and indeed his ministers are following. We saw the email from the chief of staff to the Chief Minister:
The Chief Minister is very annoyed about today’s P2 article in the Canberra Times.
It seeks a number of actions, including:
• A detailed brief explaining … OwnPlace …
• A letter to the editor attacking the reporting and the Canberra Times willingness to work together with the Lib leader in trying to talk down our housing affordability schemes;
• A media release …
• A half page ad for Saturday’s paper …
And this was at 8.40 on the morning of the article. We see that, by 8.40 on the morning of the article, the Chief Minister, because he is annoyed and, by his own admission, has acted unreasonably because he was annoyed—that is what the email says—he spends thousands of dollars of taxpayers’ money responding, because he does not feel capable of making the arguments himself, because he actually cannot attack anything in the article. All he can indeed do is attack the headline.
But I am particularly interested in this reference to “a letter to the editor attacking the reporting and the Canberra Times willingness to work together with the Lib leader in trying to talk down our housing affordability schemes”. So we have got another conspiracy theory here, a conspiracy that somehow the Canberra Times and the Liberal Party in the ACT are working together to get Jon Stanhope; we are all out to get him. This is becoming the talk around town—whether the Chief Minister is quite with us these days. Everything is a conspiracy. If he gets a bad day’s coverage, it must be a conspiracy. It could not be that he got it wrong; it could not be that someone just took the opportunity to write an article that was critical of him. Jon Stanhope is fast gaining a reputation.
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