Page 41 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 14 February 2012
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When we say that they have misled them, what we are saying, in Assembly terms, is that they did not tell the truth. What they said was deceptive. What they said was wrong, and they knew it to be wrong. Members here today—you, Mr Speaker, and Ms Porter—have taken exception to the word “lies”. So we will not use the word “lies”, but they have been deceptive. They have wilfully misled people in this Assembly through debates in this place—these are the terms of the motion—and in the estimates hearings and, through them, the people of the ACT, in their statements about this. This is a blatant mislead.
Ms Le Couteur can say as much as she likes that this is a silly motion. Every time a member of this place misleads the Assembly and does not fix the record, the forms of this place require that they should be censured because we have to maintain the highest standards of truth inside this place. And this is not a silly motion.
These ministers—Ms Gallagher, originally as Treasurer and now as Chief Minister, and Mr Barr as the Treasurer—have persistently told the Assembly and told the estimates committee that if they go out and build the house of hubris, the palais de Stanhope, across the way here, for a mere bagatelle, $432 million—if you say it quickly it does not sound much—we could year in, year out, in current dollar terms, save the ACT taxpayer $32 million. That is why we did it.
We had the spectacle in the estimates hearings of consultant after consultant coming forward and trying to answer the questions of the estimates committee and the other members of the Assembly who came and took the time to ask questions in that hearing. We also had the spectacle, when questions were asked about this at other times in the estimates hearings, of the estimates committee being told, “You shouldn’t ask us that question; you should ask this directorate that question,” or “Another directorate would be able to answer that specific question.” We found that, in fact, those other directorates could not.
What we were shown was a cobbled together, A4 piece of paper that got us to $32 million worth of savings. When we tried to drill down into that, time and time again there was no information forthcoming. There were spreadsheets. The process by which you got to $32 million towards the bottom of the page could not be explained. Mr Seselja makes the point that, if that $32 million was a real, true figure, why are Mr Barr and Ms Gallagher walking away from those savings now? They are walking away from those savings now because that $32 million figure was a confection. It was a mislead. It was wrong and they did not correct the record.
At no stage, when Mr Stanhope made those claims, did Ms Gallagher as the Treasurer come along and say: “Gee, Jon, you need to be careful about that. Do those figures really stack up?” She took over the job and she carried the baton for the house of hubris. And as we saw a couple of weeks ago, the government, in the middle of an extra-long weekend, walked away from it. It is called putting out the trash. When you hope that no-one is listening, you announce the things that you do not want anyone to hear. In putting out the trash, Ms Gallagher and Mr Barr together admitted to the lie of the figures. They put a lie to the figures on the day that they announced that because they walked away. They could not substantiate the savings.
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