Ministerial Statement

RETRACTION AND APOLOGY

The Hon. M.D. RANN (Ramsay—Premier, Minister for Economic Development, Minister for Social Inclusion, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change) (14:06): I seek leave to make a ministerial statement.

Leave granted.

The Hon. M.D. RANN: On 28 April 2009, in and outside this house, the Leader of the Opposition made the gravest allegations against me, and others. I have now received a personally signed letter from the Leader of the Opposition that I will now read into Hansard, plus another letter from his solicitor that I will quote from and table. The letter reads:

Dear Mike,

Retraction and apology.

In a media release issued by me on 28 April, I accused you and others of serious criminal misconduct and I also released documents that I claimed supported my allegations.

My allegations were untrue and the documents I released were forgeries.

I accept that the allegations I made against you in the media release and in subsequent media interviews were false and unfairly and improperly questioned your honesty and integrity.

I accept that you did not in any way act dishonestly or corruptly.

I unreservedly apologise to you for the hurt and embarrassment I have caused you, your office and your family.

The substance of this apology and retraction was read by me in parliament on 3 June 2009. It is in addition to the earlier apologies made by me on 29 April and 8 May.

I have given the forged documents to the police and requested that they investigate who created them.

Martin Hamilton-Smith MP.

Member for Waite.

And duly signed. I table that retraction and apology.

When the Leader of the Opposition first made the allegations against me and others, he told parliament:

Sources from within the Labor Party have advised the opposition that the 'man called Tom' is the Minister for Correctional Services.

Later that day in a press release headlined 'Rann-raid on Hubbard's cupboard', the Leader of the Opposition stated that this series of emails were 'leaked from within the ALP's state headquarters'.

That release said that the emails reveal the meeting followed discussions between two ALP identities, 'Tom' and 'Nick', which, and I quote again from the Leader of the Opposition, 'ALP insiders have told the opposition are Tom Koutsantonis and Nick Bolkus.' The Leader of the Opposition said receipts 'also leaked from within the ALP' show the invoices were paid.

The next day, on Wednesday 29 April, the Leader of the Opposition called a news conference and said—and I want to quote this exactly:

Now, I make no apology whatsoever, for asking questions in parliament about these matters. And if I receive documents, we had a very good look at these, we had very thorough diligence done on them, and we will ask the questions.

He added:

...we've received this information, we had a good look at it for 24 hours. I had lawyers look over it.

The Leader of the Opposition and his staff were leaving nobody in any doubt that he had not only received this information from inside ALP headquarters, and that he had sources inside the ALP, but that he had also given these documents thorough due diligence. He had the lawyers crawl all over them. He had applied the utmost diligence before releasing such potentially damaging material. His people had spoken to ALP insiders. He had made a huge effort to test them and, at the end of all of this, he said, 'Yes, they are genuine.' Not even the Adelaide postcode on the Sydney address of Applied Scholastics had rung alarm bells.

Added to this, the Leader of the Opposition's own press release pointed out that Applied Scholastics' principal place of business could no longer be found and it had not lodged an annual return since 2003. Not even that rang any alarm bells. As far as the Leader of the Opposition was concerned, that only added to the intrigue.

However, the leader's claims of ALP sources and due diligence are completely refuted in a letter I have received from the Leader of the Opposition's own solicitor, which accompanied his written apology. The letter from Mr A. Rossi of Moody Rossi and Co., which accompanied the apology, which I have just tabled, states:

In response to the invitation that our client reveal how the documents came into his possession, we advise that, as has been widely reported, the documents were sent to the member for Unley at Parliament House.

His solicitor goes on to say:

Neither the member nor our client knows who sent them or have they claimed to have known the identity of the person who sent them.

He goes on to say again—and I quote directly from the Leader of the Opposition's own solicitor:

True it is that our client initially claimed that the documents came from 'inside' ALP headquarters. That is because he believed them to be genuine and, from their content and context, it was reasonable to conclude that is where they came from.

It was clear by his lawyer's own admission that the Leader of the Opposition had not done the due diligence he publicly claimed to have done—and that should have been afforded these documents, given the seriousness and damaging nature of the allegations being made. It is also easy to draw the inference that the Leader of the Opposition had no 'ALP sources' and that he had no idea of the origins of the documents.

The discrepancy between the Leader of the Opposition's account and his solicitor's own admissions on his behalf raise important questions about his recklessness, truthfulness and character, but I will leave that for the public to judge in March next year.

I am prepared to accept the Leader of the Opposition's retraction and his fulsome apology. I will speak to my solicitors this afternoon and, if undertakings offered by the Leader of the Opposition through his lawyers are fully complied with, I will instruct them not to proceed. I understand others may be seeking legal redress for the Leader of the Opposition's publicly made allegations of criminality, but that is a matter for them.

As we have seen again today in this house, the Leader of the Opposition does not seem to have learned from his experience. This morning he once again made false allegations of criminality against another MP—this time the Deputy Premier—and, again, under the cover of parliamentary privilege.

Being elected to parliament affords certain privileges. We have the privilege in this house of having the protected freedom of saying what we want about any subject matter, with the proviso that the information we bring into this place is, to the best of our knowledge, factually correct. This is the responsibility that every one of us elected to this parliament must uphold to the highest standards. My sincere hope is that every member of this place, and of the Legislative Council, has learned a lesson from this sorry affair: that with privileges come responsibilities. You cannot use this place to slur people's reputations unfairly and dishonestly.

The SPEAKER: I warn the cameraman in the gallery that he must film only members on their feet.