Jum Wallner

So how about, you know... And so basically, from 1990 to 2020, the two governments have been arguing about...

whose responsibility it was.

And when all the houses were bought back in 2015, the ACT government had to borrow a billion dollars from the federal government.

I don't know what happened behind closed doors, but I suspect that wasn't their first offer.

You know, they might have been going, how about a bit of contribution here?

Oh, yeah, we'll lend you the money.

Now we had a Labor ACT government and a federal Liberal government.

So our first question was which government?

And we kind of realised fairly quickly it was unlikely that one government was going to set up a comprehensive financial support system for victims without the other...

you know, contributing.

So then the question came, which one do we go at first?

So we decided on the ACT government basically because we thought they'd be easier to get to and more likely to say yes, at least initially.

So we wrote a letter.

And that's what you're supposed to do.

But we had to get our letter out of the pile.

We were on a ticking clock.

We didn't know how long John would live.

We needed to get it done.

We wanted to get it done while he was still alive.

So I just asked everyone, and Bruce did, and we all asked.