James O'Loughlin

So it's really hard to actually get the attention of one minister.

Yes.

And you've got to get different ministers from different political parties together around the same table.

This was the challenge that you'd set for yourself.

How hard was that going to be, James?

Well, luckily I didn't think very far ahead.

Yeah.

So, James, you realised, given that the ACT government didn't exist at the time and the federal government seemed to have been doing – had been warned, nonetheless, it was unclear who to go to first.

So you realised you had to get both governments on board, the ACT government and the feds on board –

Who did you approach first?

I don't know about the bar government, but my experience with state and territory governments is the figure at the top, the premier or the chief minister, accrues all the power, all of it, and nothing happens unless the premier says so.

So is that your dilemma here?

You've got to get the premier's attention or the chief minister's attention in this case, but then everyone's trying to get this guy's attention because nothing happens unless the person at the top says so.

So you were successful in getting your letter pulled out of the pile and waved in front of his face.

But you say at the time you felt a tiny bit guilty because it felt a bit like cheating.

Why do you say that?

Now, in the Hollywood movie of this, it would be the story of you as the good guys against the bad, indifferent, callous bastards of the various governments of Australia.

But you didn't see it like that, did you?

Australians often have a kind of a shallow cynicism about politics, but maybe it's easy to forget that for, not all of them by any means, but for a great many politicians, a lot of them go into politics out of this kind of, I don't know, youthful hope they might have had once that they could actually make the world a better place.

Were you counting on that?