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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 12 Hansard (24 November) . . Page.. 3560 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
who refuses to allow public servants to appear before an Assembly committee, who turns an inherently dangerous project into a public spectacle, and who allows unwarranted interference on an industrial site. This is the can-do Chief Minister who cannot do the one thing required of her now.
The coroner acknowledges the manner in which the implosion is indelibly imprinted on the collective consciousness of the Canberra community. The coroner said:
One only needs to view and listen to the video evidence to gain the sense of outrage and anger expressed by the spectators on that Sunday afternoon.
The anger and outrage have barely faded in the 21/2 years since. But this is the Chief Minister who thumbs her nose at the anger of the Canberra community by refusing to accept that she must act to discharge the responsibility for appalling administrative failures that she says she accepts. This the Chief Minister who so arrogantly told the Canberra Times that she was absolved from now having to act to discharge her responsibility because she had been re-elected only months after the implosion. The Chief Minister was reported as follows:
"That's the political side of it", she told the Canberra Times, "I am not worried about that at all. We had an election some seven months after the implosion at which I was re-elected. I think that says it all."
Have you ever heard such arrogance? It says something, all right.
It is not difficult to anticipate the defence that the Government will run to this motion. The Government will say that, as the coroner indicates, the fact that the hospital buildings were to be demolished by means of implosion meant a crowd would attend out of simple curiosity. Of course, in recognition of this fact, when implosion has been used to demolish buildings in other places, the time has been carefully chosen to avoid crowds. In fact, it is not unusual to demolish buildings at night to achieve precisely that.
I do not dispute the curiosity value of an implosion, but I do dispute that a crowd of 100,000 would have attended. I do dispute that a crowd of any notable size would have attended if the act had been carried out on a weekday without any glitzy promotion, without a radio station running a competition on pushing the plunger. I do contend that the decision to conduct the implosion as a public event was made in the Chief Minister's office, and driven by that office, without any understanding of the dangers or attempt to assess the risk and with the full knowledge and approval of the Chief Minister - as the coroner says, with her full imprimatur.
There is nothing in the coroner's report to indicate whether the Chief Minister or her advisers ever considered any alternative arrangements to the spectacle that they concocted on 13 July 1997. Did they consider warning the public not to attend? Did they advise people to stay at home and watch it on television? To the contrary, the Chief Minister chose to accept the advice of people close to her that there was no danger when
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