Page 28 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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I’m concerned there is an implication, or it’s implicit of some of the reporting of this horrendous disaster, that in some way our services or individuals within our services failed.
I stand beside each and every member of the Emergency Services Bureau. I stand beside every member of our fire service, our police service, our volunteers, our rural service, all those NSW officers that were part and parcel of the defence of Canberra.
What I am saying is don’t cheer me, if you want to blame someone blame me. Cheer those people in this community who put their lives on the line for all of us, that’s what I am asking.
That is what I said. I know what I did and did not do on 18 January. I know what I could and could not have done. That is why I will not and cannot accept without comment the errors of fact and mistaken conclusions of Coroner Doogan in relation to my own knowledge and my behaviour. That is why I will not resign. It is why today I must defend my reputation. I do not relish this debate. I believe it to be totally unwarranted.
Mr Speaker, a motion of no confidence in the Chief Minister is the most serious motion that can be moved in the Assembly. There have been a number of these motions in the short history of this chamber, and one might perhaps wonder why the opposition leader has dwelt in recent days, and again here today, so much on those historic events and so little on the reasons that he says have brought him to this juncture.
One might wonder, too, at his lack of self-awareness in accusing me of hypocrisy and double standards in arguing a position on ministerial responsibility diametrically opposed to the one I took in relation to Kate Carnell. Can’t he see that his own position has undergone a similarly material shift—in the opposite direction? He quoted the words I uttered at the time but, notably, not his own.
I believe that most people can, without difficulty, distinguish between a disaster that was stage-managed, micromanaged and proudly, fiercely and protectively choreographed by the office of the Chief Minister and the events that led to today’s motion—a cataclysm, an act of God that was decades in the making.
It is one of the unsavoury aspects of the profession to which the Leader of the Opposition and I currently belong that there is sometimes a temptation to play politics with the grief and misfortune of others. Today, the grief and misfortune of an entire community are the playthings of the opposition. But the motion has been put and it must be debated. And I am grateful to belong to a nation and to be a member of a legislature where I may debate the matters raised by my political opponents as well as take issue with the findings of the coroner.
In her 800-page, two-volume report, the coroner made 73 recommendations. On the very day the report was handed down, the government undertook to respond comprehensively to each of those recommendations. Yesterday it did so, and actions will flow from that response.
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