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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 8 Hansard (21 August) . . Page.. 3026 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

it is a lie. I asked them to retract and they did, which was good of them. Stateline were the people. They dropped my name off it. But on the day that ABC news broadcast the retraction, Stateline ran it. This is the Stateline we all know and love; the poor man's 60 Minutes, the intellectual Big Brother. But Stateline persisted with it, without my name, just dropping it there that the recommendation was made to declare a state of emergency later in the morning.

They have now, I understand, picked on the time of 12.20, which really is quite intriguing. I had no conversations with anybody associated with the Emergency Services Bureau before 12.20. I am not quite sure at what stage I did have my first conversation with the Emergency Services Bureau. It was certainly after that and it certainly was not until 2 o'clock, as I have previous indicated, that a meeting was convened which was attended, as I say, by the head of the Chief Minister's Department, the head of JACS, the head of the Emergency Services Bureau, the ACT Chief Police Officer and others at which there was a discussion around the pros and cons of declaring a state of emergency, the result of which was that between 2.30 and 2.40 the decision was made and acted on to declare a state of emergency.

As to the question of why I did not declare a state of emergency at 9 o'clock, the obvious response in a way is: why would I have declared a state of emergency at 9 o'clock? To what end? What would it have sought to achieve and on what basis would I just wake up on Saturday morning and think, "What a good day to declare a state of emergency?"Why would I do that?

Mr Smyth: You only had to look outside your window.

MR STANHOPE: Oh, I only had to look outside my window when I woke up and I would have thought, "Gee, what a good day for a state of emergency!"This is arrant nonsense in the extreme.

Mrs Cross: It is not nonsense when four people died.

MR SPEAKER: Order! I am not going to put up with interjections. I have made that clear. Members will have to restrain themselves, otherwise we will get into a situation in which members are not representing their constituents properly. The Chief Minister has been asked a question. He should be allowed to answer it in silence.

MR STANHOPE: I will conclude with this remark, just to make the point in relation to this nonsense: I do not know whether Mrs Cross knows just how offensive that last interjection of hers was; just how offensive it is to suggest that the fact that I did not declare a state of emergency at 9 o'clock, when it had not been suggested to me, had not entered my mind, had no real purpose, caused the death of four people. That Mrs Cross sits there and dares to suggest that I have some culpability in the deaths of four Canberrans is the most appalling and awful thing I have heard in this Assembly in my years in it.

Mrs Cross: Don't twist things. Why don't you get rid of the people responsible?

MR SPEAKER: Order!

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