Page 4412 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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We were not to concern ourselves with the recoupment of the capital cost involved in the exercise other than obtaining a contribution of $1m from the Raiders/New South Wales Rugby League.
In other words, the Territory never intended to recover the capital cost, nor did it intend to set the arrangement up on a normal commercial basis. The public was never told this.
Price Waterhouse then advised that protracted negotiation with the Raiders had culminated in the Raiders producing a document which Price Waterhouse recommended be the basis of any agreement entered into between the Raiders and the Administration. The consultants further advised that in negotiating with the Raiders they had taken the view that simplicity should be the watchword and that they had endeavoured to put into place arrangements which are easy to understand and control and to avoid the need for detailed checking or audit. The consultants further advised an estimated trust income for the first year based on projected crowd sizes of 10,000, 12,500, 15,000, 17,500 and 20,000, with a gross revenue varying from $240,000 a year to $348,000 per annum.
On 26 June 1989 the agreement between the ACT Government and the Canberra District Rugby League was signed. My then Law Office did not locate for me any copy of the agreement which had been signed on each of the 15 pages and annexures. In legal terms its execution was somewhat irregular. On 25 July 1979 Mr Whalan, under questioning, revealed in this Assembly, in response to a question, that the arrangement had been finalised.
One of the estimates available to me as Minister some two years later was that the Raiders would secure approximately $2.4m gross revenue per year and that the ACT Government would get $310,000 of that, and that is all. I have been to most rugby league games at the stadium, and crowd sizes, to my personal knowledge, have varied from some 22,000 downwards.
Other records now indicate that the subsidies subsequently provided to the Bruce Stadium trust, as it was called, to enable it to operate in 1990-91 and 1991-92 were in the region of $568,000 and $648,000 for each of those financial years. In each of those years sums of $218,000 and $368,000 respectively were allocated from the ACT budget by capitalising debt servicing interest payments rather than a direct payment to the trust account. They were, nevertheless, a subsidy in that sum.
The public have every reason to ask how, for the period 20 September 1989 to 30 June 1990, the trust sustained an operating loss of $2,007,590 based on a profit and loss statement submitted by the ACT Auditor-General to me, as former Minister, on 13 May 1991. The Auditor-General gives the estimated opening written down value of the stadium
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