Page 3914 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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When any manager, I do not care whether it is in the Housing Trust, in Urban Services, in ACTION or anywhere else, starts committing very large sums of public money, you have to get to a point where you say that he does not have unilateral authority to make that commitment. He has to come back to the responsible Minister. When you start talking about housing redevelopment projects, it is even more of a persuasive argument that the Minister should know what it is that the commissioner is doing. Why is the commissioner committing $5m or $10m or $20m or $25m, or whatever the sum is? The only way the Minister can know is for the commissioner to be obliged to come to him and say, "This is the proposal".
I come back to the point, though, that the Minister has not justified why $1.5m is a good figure. Why not $5m? If we are going to say to the Commissioner for Housing, "You can get into housing redevelopment projects", knowing that housing development projects can be very costly, why $1.5m? It has no logic to it. I repeat: The issue is not how much the money is; it is what the money is going to be spent on. I believe that the Minister has a responsibility to satisfy himself or herself on the particular project on which this expenditure is to be made.
To say to any manager, "You go ahead and spend the money; I do not want to know about it until it hits the fan, or until some auditor picks it up in an audit report", is waiting until the horse has escaped. The Government is responsible, and it has to accept the responsibility before the decision is made, not afterwards. There is no accountability if it is only a matter of catching up with the thing after the event. In any language, $1.5m is a very significant amount of money. Quite frankly, Madam Speaker, if I were the Minister, I would want to know what my managers are doing when they start talking about money of that order of magnitude. I would not be happy that any manager, even at the highest level, should go about his or her business as though I had no interest in it, committing the government to expenditures of money in $1.5m doses without my even being aware of it or knowing what they were proposing to do with it. I think that it is poor management. It is not being accountable, and I would like to see some control over it. If the Minister can tell me why $1.5m is a good figure, I might change my mind; but he had his opportunity and he did not do it. I do not see the relevance of it.
That being the case, I support Mr Cornwell. I believe that until we have some justification for making this change the limit ought to remain at $500,000 - a very princely sum, even today, and one that one could argue the Minister might allow his senior managers to deal with without reference. I will not go beyond that until the Minister persuades me as to why I should, and he has not done so.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (9.05): Full marks for mock outrage from the Liberal Party. The explanation that was originally given to you in shorthand was that this reflects commercial reality. I know that the Real Estate Institute has advised you, as it has advised me, that it believes that this provision reflects commercial reality. So, you have had that advice from industry. I told you that, industry has told you that, and yet you have produced these histrionics. Mr Kaine rhetorically says, "Can you justify $1.5m?". Mr Kaine, you certainly cannot justify what you are doing in this amendment, which is justifying keeping it at $500,000. We know that since that $500,000 was introduced in 1987 there has been an escalation in the Canberra real estate market of in the order of 80 to 90 per cent. So, the figure as it was in 1987 would now need to be about $800,000 to $900,000.
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