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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (13 February) . . Page.. 33 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

face value and to take seriously recommendations, particularly from quarters such as the Auditor-General, for change to occur within the government.

As members know, Mr Speaker, there are no recommendations associated with the Auditor's report, although I understand some may yet be forthcoming. I think that any government needs to take such a report seriously, and I have indicated in no uncertain terms that that is the process that we will use as well.

Mr Speaker, I do not lead a government which is immune from the weakness of making mistakes. Neither did Mrs Carnell. Neither, might I say, will anyone on the other side of the chamber. But the difference between a good government and a bad government is whether it will be prepared to acknowledge and deal with mistakes once they are made. That is what I have said to this community I intend to do-that is, to acknowledge and fix mistakes that have been identified. That is what I intend to do to indicate that this government will be a good government.

MR STANHOPE: I have a supplementary question. I thank the Chief Minister for his, albeit, very uninformative response. Acknowledging that the Chief Minister was the Deputy Chief Minister and Attorney-General during all the decision-making in relation to Bruce Stadium, can he tell us what mistakes he acknowledges he made personally over the Bruce fiasco? Can he say whether the fact that his apology was made a day after the Auditor-General wrote to him seeking support for a broadening of the Auditor's powers was purely coincidental to the making of the apology?

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, on that latter point, I had not seen the Auditor's letter to me at the time I made those comments. Those comments in fact had been prepared some days beforehand and discussed in fact with a variety of people within the government. So I could not have known what the Auditor was going to say to me on that subject.

Mr Stanhope is very keen to assign personal blame here to members of the government other than the minister or ministers who were responsible for the development of the Bruce Stadium. I come back to the statement that, first of all, governments are collectively responsible for what they do. There is a degree to which any mistake made by a minister will have to be accounted for by all the ministers at the time that the government, for example, goes next to the people.

As Mr Stanhope will be well aware, that issue will no doubt be put before the electors. He will be aware of that because no doubt he is planning to do so himself. We will need to account to the ACT community for our handling not just of the Bruce Stadium but the aftermath of that redevelopment and indicate very clearly what we have done about that redevelopment and the report of the Auditor-General.

Mr Stanhope has been keen to attribute some blame to me as Attorney-General sitting in cabinet for apparently not offering suitable advice to cabinet about the legal advice offered by departments about the Bruce Stadium. I might note that I do not recall my predecessor as Attorney-General offering to resign from the ministry of the day because he had not offered the appropriate advice to his colleague the minister for sport during the VITAB fiasco. So I would simply say to Mr Stanhope that he had better be consistent in the approach that he takes.

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