Page 1754 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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The difference between the Kaine alliance government and the Stanhope Labor government a few years on is that Mr Kaine made available his review of the territory’s finances, the state of the territory’s operations and the state of the territory’s public service. It was out there clearly for everyone to see. The underlying work done by former Justice Rae Else-Mitchell in that review was there for people to see. They could agree or disagree, but they at least knew where the alliance government was coming from when they made decisions, some of which were very unpopular.
That is not the case with the government here today. We still have them hiding behind “It is a cabinet document; it is dreadfully secret.” My experience, especially in the past six to eight months, has been one of obfuscation, with every opportunity taken to try and stymie attempts to obtain information from a government that was elected on a platform of being open and accountable.
As you know, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have been in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This has been a long road for me. I will not discuss the issues at length because these are questions still being considered by the tribunal. But I do want to draw to the Assembly’s attention that I have now been subjected to the issuing of three separate lots of conclusive certificates, the third lot of conclusive certificates issued as recently as the Friday before last in response to my counsel’s comments and summation to the tribunal about the failings in the territory’s case.
Obviously the territory has looked at it and said, “We really did mess that up.” It had to issue a third lot of conclusive certificates to cover itself. It seems now that the Chief Minister’s Department has washed its hands of the whole matter and has passed it entirely over to the department of education because of their appallingly inappropriate and hopeless handling of the whole issue. The other day my solicitor said to me, “I am not a great expert in what is going on with school closures but there must be some heinous secrets here because they are trying extraordinarily hard to cover them up and to stymie things.” They were his words to me.
What we see here is an affront to the rights of ACT citizens. It is an affront to any notion or expectation of transparency. In addition to that, it is bungling incompetence of the highest order when we see three attempts to issue conclusive certificates—and even now we think that they have not got it right.
I do not know what it is that the Stanhope government is trying to hide—we do know that it is heinous—but in the light of this behaviour it must be pretty shocking. I strongly suspect that, whatever it is, it is due simply to the fact that Towards 2020 was a poorly thought out, rush job. We know, for instance, that the final presentation that went to cabinet was a PowerPoint presentation and that the PowerPoint presentation is being very closely guarded. We know that if we actually looked at it we would find that the decisions made were extraordinarily faulty indeed.
When we look at the issue of the extraordinarily faulty process that this government went through and its attempts to cover up after the fact, we have to look at the heroic efforts of the Flynn community. The Flynn community, the former school community and the neighbours of Flynn have been extraordinarily courageous in their attempts to
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