Environment
Rosebery: Giddings responds
QUESTION: The toxic heavy metals taskforce plans to write to you today, they’re saying they want Roscoe Taylor and Chrissie Pickin to be stood down because they’ve mishandled the Rosebery investigation, what are your thoughts on that?
GIDDINGS: I have the upmost confidence in both Dr Roscoe Taylor and Dr Chrissie Pickin, they’ve performed their jobs extremely well in my time as Health Minister, I have not seen anything that would make me doubt their expertise and their knowledge and the processes that they have put in place to resolve issues of concern to communities.
QUESTION: The taskforce is concerned, they’re saying that the investigation was woeful and bias can you say I guess categorically that that’s not the case?
GIDDINGS: We haven’t even progressed through this second stage that we are now going through to try to work out if there is in fact a problem in Roseberry or not. I think it is far too early for anybody to be casting any aspersions on a process that is independent, on a process that I have the upmost confidence in, will provide us with the evidence that we need to know whether there is action that needs to be taken in Roseberry or not.
QUESTION: Does the very fact that there had to be this second stage suggest that the first stage was mishandled?
GIDDINGS: Not at all, I have absolute confidence in the processes of the first stage, we did at times struggle to get the people who were complaining to actually participate and make open their medical records in that first stage, we did and progressed as much as we possibly could with the information that we had and I’m confident that we came to a reasonable conclusion with what we had. Of course if further evidence is bought to our attention that we didn’t have previously, that needs to be investigated or other ideas have come forward, of course we’re willing to go back and look at what we need to do and that’s exactly what we’re doing now.
QUESTION: Did Roscoe Taylor and Chrissie Pickin, have they done enough for the residents of Roseberry?
GIDDINGS: Absolutely.