Department of the Legislative Assembly, Northern Territory Government

Mr STIRLING - 1999-04-22

I seek leave to table a transcript from 2 focus groups conducted by Mark Textor for the Country Liberal Party government on 21 April 1993.

Leave granted.

Mr STIRLING: I do want the Chief Minister to be able to see this transcript, because I want to refer him to a particular section of it. I refer the Chief Minister to page 6, which details an exchange between one of the participants and Textor.

The participant says: ‘So what’s your job exactly?’, and Textor replies: ‘I am a market researcher’. Participant: ‘Do you work for the Labor or the Liberal governments?’. Textor then lies to the participant, and all those present, and says: ‘No, I don’t work for either. What I do is, I come up in different states to companies that operate in that state, and I try to find out what is the big picture’. Throughout that transcript, Textor repeats this lie a number of times.

Chief Minister, do you endorse Territory taxpayers paying Mark Textor to lie to Territorians?

ANSWER

Mr Speaker, this is 1993. As I said before, I’ll read this. Interesting reading, I am sure, provide some good bedtime reading, provide some historical reference to things that happened many, many years ago, and I will have a look at it.

This is a private operator, operating under directions, as I understand it, from Andrew Coward, and we’ve said on many occasions how Andrew Coward operated in his dealings.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016