Page 2382 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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contribution by the hands-on public servants involved in budget direction. Whilst it is sometimes very good to have a politically driven budget, we have to remember that we have got a fledgling minority Labor government which has not put a budget together before.
We saw, Mr Speaker, the tentative processes developed by this Government in bringing forward its budget, and it produced incremental ideas to test the waters and advanced step by step. The same is happening, of course, with the proposed expenditures that are not fully detailed for the hospital scheme. This is an incremental, tentative, hesitant, minority government. Mr Speaker, the Estimates Committee hearings demonstrated that quite fully.
One other aspect that was clear to me in the Estimates Committee was the very close working relationship some Ministers have with their officials. That has plus and minus values in it, and certainly the Rally in government would move very quickly to re-establish traditional objectivity in terms of advising and relationships on financial advice.
Mr Speaker, one matter that came up in the Estimates Committee was the question of direct sales of leases. The committee was given, after request, a list of direct sales, which revealed that there had been two sales for an industrial purpose and, as we now know and as was fleshed out by the Rally initially, those direct sales were to Revlon at Hume for two large blocks at $35,000 rent per annum.
But what we did not have in the Estimates Committee process and what was not volunteered to us was a document that came to the Rally's attention off the file. This was a genuine document, as it has now turned out, dated 29 January 1989, in which a comment is made by a most senior official saying, after a valuation had been made for the purposes of the direct sale, these most ominous words: the prices asked are well below market value, possibly half real value.
A perusal of the file, over the shoulder of an official in the presence of the relevant Minister by my colleague Mr Jensen and me indicated that the valuation was a letter asking for a valuation and a figure signalled back - nothing of the type of valuation report that my colleague Mr Kaine and I, who have been in the real estate industry, for instance, or dealt with them, would know. My other legal colleagues and anyone else here should note that no valuation report appeared, no photograph of the site, no explanation of the terrain. The general issues affecting valuation that have been well established by the Valuers Institute have not been covered.
We do not know the basis for it, but how, after the valuation was requested and received, a most senior official could say that the values are well below market
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