Page 843 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 16 March 2010
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due to gross negligence. What we as an opposition were doing in February was trying to get to the bottom of what is an absolute tragedy. We tried to get the documents and the information so that we could stop this sort of thing happening again both in the short term and in the long term.
Yet here we have a minister who has resisted every single opportunity to cooperate—to cooperate with the opposition, to cooperate with the public and to even cooperate with his own department and departments of other state and federal governments around Australia. Mr Corbell has been totally negligent. To this day, his pride and his arrogance stop him admitting that he made a mistake and that we should try and rectify it. Mr Corbell repeatedly denied that he had received complaints. We heard about the problem with Mrs Dunne’s question. He said:
The problem with Mrs Dunne’s question is that there have been no complaints to authorities about any dodgy installation.
That is what he said—that no complaints had been received by our regulatory agencies in relation to dodgy practice. He also said:
I have clearly indicated to this place that the government has received no complaints about dodgy installation since the commonwealth program commenced.
He continued:
There have not been any matters brought to the attention of ACT regulatory authorities about poor installation.
I think it is quite clear that Mr Corbell did have documents. Mrs Dunne has presented them here, 1,000 pages, yet Mr Corbell did not seem to know they existed. This goes to a very serious problem about whether this minister is in control of his departments, whether this minister and, indeed, cabinet are in control of taxpayers’ money and whether the ACT government can capably deliver a service which really is a matter of life and death. It is a pretty serious situation and it is a shame that Mr Corbell’s pride is stopping us getting to the bottom of it.
We have seen a few interesting things today. Mr Rattenbury’s speech was quite extraordinary. Here you have Mr Corbell, the defendant, and then you have his defence lawyer, Mr Rattenbury, desperately trying to get his man off the mark, trying to get his man out of death row—going for technicalities, going for absolutely anything he can possibly do, having a go at the collection of evidence, having a go at the police officers, having a go at every single step of the way, but failing to address the core issue, which is about his competence and his ability to be a minister in this government.
If Mr Corbell is incapable of telling the truth on this matter, how can he be trusted in the future? How can we possibly have confidence in this minister to deliver government services and government programs in the future? I think it is very unlikely that we can. The Greens have put themselves in a very tricky situation. Are they going to keep giving a blank cheque to the government to do what they want? Are they going to keep letting the government get away with what is gross
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