Just before Mal Brough got onto paedophilia
on Lateline on Tuesday ,
host Tony Jones asked him a good question:

BROUGH: Tony,
I’m talking on face value what I saw 10 minutes ago by a constitutional lawyer.
I am not a constitutional lawyer. All I would simply say to you is that the
Australian public should demand of the Howard Government that if the Territory
Government doesn’t deal with these issues with us in a cooperative fashion,
then we should not at any stage rule out every alternative.

JONES: You
already have responsibility for rolling out unsniffable petrol. The Federal
Government is responsible for that.

BROUGH: That’s
right.

JONES: When is
it going to happen across the entire Territory? We know there is extra money
in the budget. When will that be spent? When will we see a situation when
there’s only one petrol station in Alice
Springs with Opal fuel?

BROUGH: I don’t
think that’s the fundamental issue. Wherever you draw the boundaries, as one of
the people on the program mentioned earlier, when you get leaders – and that’s
what they are – so-called leaders in these communities that bring it in,
children don’t drive out and bring in unsniffable or sniffable petrol. You have
Opal there and they still get hold of it. Until you get out the root cause and
it comes back to the fundamental issue I keep speaking about, and that’s law
and order and maintaining it. Everybody in those communities knows who runs the
paedophile rings…

So much for the discussion on Opal fuel.
When Brough mentioned paedophile rings he successfully
escaped answering a question a good number of politicians and workers on the
ground would like to know – when will the stakeholders, except Brough and health
Minister Tony Abbott, say the federally funded rollout of unsniffable Opal fuel
to all service stations in Alice Springs is essential for the scheme to work
out bush and to prevent a build up of hardcore petrol sniffers in the town?