Page 818 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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That is the case: the government did not run the commonwealth’s bungled and now defunct home insulation program, a program so badly bungled by the Rudd government that it will cost Australians hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ funds, the loss of over 100 homes and, more importantly, the loss of four young Australians.
I am sure the ACT government is glad that it did not have to add the bungled and now defunct home insulation program to its list of bungles over the last nine years, but there is a bungle for this government. The bungle is Minister Corbell and his persistent and continuous misleading of the Assembly in relation to this program.
The minister, as we have heard and as is clear now, did have documents when he said in the Assembly on 11 November that there were no documents. I point out to members that these are the documents that became available to members as a result of the motion in the Legislative Assembly late in February and that came to the members of the Assembly in early March. These are the documents. These are all copied back to back. There are about 1,000 pages of non-existent documents!
That, more than anything else, is the evidence that Simon Corbell lied to this Assembly. He said there were no documents. He said there were no documents, and there are clearly documents. When he said there were no documents, he knew that, in the past year, he himself had received a brief, he had written to the minister and the commonwealth minister had written back to him in relation to this matter. If he knew nothing else—if he was so ignorant about everything else—he knew that. He should have therefore known not to say in this place in such a misleading way that there are no documents. There clearly are documents. The evidence of this pile of documents before us today is enough to censure this minister for misleading the Assembly.
The minister could have done a whole lot of things. He could have said, “I do not think there are any documents because it is not our program, but I will check,” or, “I will check to see what the documents are and I will get back to the Assembly.” But he made a definite statement: “There are no documents.” This pile shows that Simon Corbell misled the Assembly on 11 February.
He came back a few days later with a letter that Mr Seselja has adverted to, but that letter makes the situation worse. When he wrote that letter and then came into the Assembly later in February and essentially recommitted what was in this letter as a clarification in the Assembly, he further misled the Assembly because he went on to say essentially that the only documents that we had were in relation to an MOU and “I did not know about the MOU at the time I gave my answer”.
Again, with the job of a minister, the code of practice requires that the minister gives truthful answers. If he does not know what the answer is, he is not entitled to make it up. His job is to say, “I do not know what the answer is and I will get back to the member.”
By making it up, Simon Corbell misled the Assembly. By coming in, recapitulating the contents of his letter in this place and saying that it was really about the MOU, he again misled the Assembly because he knew—he knew—that he had written to Peter
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