Page 2764 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 14 August 1990
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united claims by industry and unions, the Government seems keen to wash its hands of the affair. Let me read into the record of this place the comments of the director of the Australian Federation of Construction Contractors, Mr King. He is not a person who is usually noted for his support for building industry unions, nor indeed are building industry unions normally noted for their support for the Australian Federation of Construction Contractors, but on this issue, Mr Acting Speaker, they stand united. Mr King said:
There appears to have been a breathtaking recklessness in the way some of the contracts were awarded by the ACT Government in view of the fact these contracts were awarded when there were rumours about Shelley's.
That is the statement, not of some union partisan, nor of a partisan of the political interests on this side of the house, but of the representative of the construction contractors in Canberra. There is "breathtaking recklessness" in the way contract management has been handled in this Territory.
What was the response from the Government to those statements? Again I quote from the Canberra Times on 4 August:
The spokesman for the Minister for Finance and Urban Services, Craig Duby, said the Government would not accept financial responsibility for the collapse of the company and denied that the Government had been negligent in its handling of public works contracts. He said if the Government paid some of the company's debt it would set a "dangerous precedent".
"Set a dangerous precedent", Mr Acting Speaker. We hear the echoes of Sir Humphrey Appleby in that sort of approach; "The Government cannot move in, that would set a dangerous precedent". Mr Duby's argument, essentially, is that the Government is not responsible because of a business collapse and the Government is not responsible for all business that goes bad. Now, as far as the statement which has been repeated by me goes, we would have to agree with that. We do not say that the Government is always responsible whenever any business collapses in Canberra, or that any government anywhere else in Australia should always be responsible when a business collapses. But this is not so when the Government was negligent in its handling of public works contracts so as to induce the small contractors. We are not talking about the big contractors here, we are talking about small business people - people who have not got the resources to investigate matters in full themselves but who rely on government statements to enter into contracts in good faith.
We say, Mr Acting Speaker, that if the Government can be shown to have acted in such a way as to encourage the
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