Page 855 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 2 May 2007
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listed were fairness, integrity, openness, honesty, compassion, responsibility, accountability and leadership. Mr Stanhope said:
Our core values—values we draw from the community of which we are a part—will frame the manner in which a Labor Government in the Territory will go about its business—the business of governing our city-state for all Canberrans.
Not for a privileged few, or for selected interest groups.
For all Canberrans.
He probably lifted that phrase from Mr Howard’s 1996 phrase: “for all of us”. It sounds suspiciously like it.
What happened? It seems like a poor joke now. Where does one begin? One thing we could begin with is the January 2003 bushfires—terrible fires that killed four people in the ACT, three of them in the outer suburbs of Canberra that meet the bush. The government—and the Chief Minister in particular—suffered from collective amnesia when it came to testifying before the coroner. The best he could manage to do to defend his and his government’s failure to warn the public that there was a real risk of fire entering urban areas was to say that he was only acting on the advice he was given. Indeed, he was so loath to provide any openness on this issue that it took until just a few weeks ago for him to finally say where he was the night before the fires struck Canberra—and he apparently saw that as an attack on his privacy. He refused—indeed, he still refuses—to accept that he was the minister on duty and the only one who could sign off on the declaration of a state of emergency, as discussed in cabinet two days before.
Then the government did everything it could to delay the coronial inquiry into the fires, through legal delaying tactics as well as trying to remove the coroner, which delayed the decision by 12 months. That was an Australian first—certainly a first in the ACT. That was absolutely unprecedented in judicial history in the ACT and Australia—a government trying to remove its own coroner so that it could escape being accountable. So much for Labor’s core values of accountability and openness.
The Chief Minister, in promoting his code of good government, was keen to quote from another coronial report, even though that never found the executive to have advance knowledge of the problems involved and could not reasonably have done so in the circumstances. Of course, I refer to the Bender inquest. In contrast, Coroner Doogan found that the Chief Minister was very much responsible. At page 166 of volume II, she said:
… in accordance with the conventions of the Westminster model of responsible government, which apply in Australia, Mr Stanhope was the relevant Minister at the most critical time of the firestorm.
She found that the Chief Minister did nothing to ensure that the community was properly warned except after the fact—and then he downplayed the seriousness of the fires. What was his response to her report? He just said that she was wrong.
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