Page 1009 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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Staff will not come forward, a former staff member tells us, because they fear dismissal. He continued:
I have written to Joy Burch but so far have not received a reason why I was dismissed.
We know that there has been duckshoving between Minister Burch and Mr Barr on that issue. He continued:
There is no concern about staff being told what to say to the Commission, the truth is we were discouraged by our managers not to attend review meetings.
This man has told everyone who cared to listen to 666 on Tuesday morning that he was discouraged, when he was a staff member, from meeting with the review team when they visited Bimberi. That is a corruption of the system. That is an attempt to tamper with evidence before a review. If we had a judicial inquiry today, the people who did that could be bought before that inquiry for contempt of the inquiry.
But what is happening here is yet another cover-up. When people spoke about these minutes, the Chief Minister fell over himself to say, “There is nothing to see here.” The Chief Minister could justify this and the minister could justify this by saying it is clumsy wording. It is not clumsy wording. It is an attempt to get at people to make sure that they stick to the party line. It is a contempt of the process.
The Chief Minister and the minister herself are colluding in this by not distancing themselves from these processes. The more they tie themselves to these minutes and the more they deny the allegations of people who say that they were discouraged from attending review meetings—the more they do this—the more they make themselves part of this corrupted system. And this is why we are here today.
Let us go on. After that email was read and after the Chief Minister finished, another former Bimberi staffer rang 666 and went live to air to tell Alex Sloane that she had been stood down after she went to the Bimberi inquiry. She used to work at Bimberi; she does not work at Bimberi anymore. She was told by her current supervisor that she was not to approach the Bimberi inquiry. But she had already done so and she made it clear to her colleagues that she had already done so. After that she was stood down. This is a person who has been victimised by this government, by their officials.
These people are being victimised to send a message to everybody else: do not step out of line or you will be treated in the same way. People are scared for their jobs. They have children to feed, mortgages to pay, school fees to pay, groceries to buy. They cannot afford to lose their jobs. They cannot afford to be stood aside. And we will never get to the truth while people who work for this government are so intimidated. So the Canberra Liberals are here today to stand up for the welfare of the people who work there and for the welfare of the people who may have something to say about this whole process.
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