Page 1997 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 15 June 1994
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MR DE DOMENICO (4.16): Madam Speaker, I will limit my remarks to two areas. The first thing I would like to talk about is the unfortunate way in which the Government has decided to act in getting rid of the ACTTAB board and its chief executive prior to publicly releasing a copy of the VITAB report. The concept of natural justice is spoken about in this place and, whilst not disagreeing with the fact that something had to be done to the board, and that something had to be done or said, or both, to the chief executive of the board, perhaps the timing and the manner in which it was done leaves a lot to be desired. Having said that, I also want to put on the record that I think that the new Minister, Mr Lamont, had a very difficult job to do. He inherited, to use the words being used by a lot of journalists, the greatest stuff-up of all time. Why did he inherit that? I will also talk about what was said in the body of the report put down by Professor Pearce. Notwithstanding the fact that some members on this side of the house have had a very limited opportunity of examining what was said in that report, it needs addressing.
I will start my remarks by referring to page 2 of the Chief Minister's remarks. At the bottom of the page she says:
Madam Speaker, these conclusions do not surprise me. I had always expected that a dispassionate and apolitical examination of the VITAB issue would find that no fault lay with the Minister.
I think that these words need reflection. I am going to attempt to be passionate and political. I think that, at the very beginning of this affair, had the Labor Government not been passionate and completely political we would not be in the situation we find ourselves in today. Let me expand on those remarks. Mr Berry last year - we will never forget this - came into this place and said, "Listen, we are going to decorporatise ACTTAB". Members of the Opposition and people outside this place said time and time again, "Minister, if it ain't broke don't fix it".
The first thing that the Minister did, in his usual way, was to call it a political stunt. He said that the Liberals were being ideological and all that sort of rubbish. Let us see what happened before ACTTAB was decorporatised. What Professor Pearce had to say bears reflecting on. We all know, Madam Speaker, that before the decorporatisation of ACTTAB it had two shareholders - namely, the Chief Minister and the Deputy Chief Minister at the time, Mr Berry - and was a Territory owned corporation. Three of the members of the board were very senior ACT Government bureaucrats. That was prior to its being decorporatised.
If there is one thing that this report makes clear - at the very least the Government can bank on this - it is that there has been a complete lack of communication between the bureaucracy, the ACTTAB board and the Minister. Had the Government left ACTTAB as a Territory owned corporation, this would not have happened, because on that board there would have been three very senior bureaucrats and two members of Cabinet. If you read what Professor Pearce says, he intimates, without actually saying so, that that was not a bad sort of a structure because you get the best of all worlds - two Government Ministers, so Cabinet can be informed all the time as to what is going on; three senior bureaucrats, so that the public service can be informed as to what is going on; and other members of the board that the Government sees fit to appoint.
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