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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 1952 ..

Mrs Carnell: We finished early on Health because you ran out of questions.

MR BERRY: We will come back to Health in due course, and we will come back with a vengeance. Here we have the Government hoping to limit the estimates process to avoid scrutiny, and it got away with it. We ended up with the same situation as we have ended up with before, that is, the inability to easily compare where we are in relation to the budget. Some would say that this has been a top job from the people who devise the budget papers. I asked the question in our briefing on the budget papers from officers what they thought they got out of 10 for making these documents difficult to compare with previous documents. In my experience in this place, that seems to be the major role that officers pursue in relation to budgets - to make them difficult for people to consider, rather than easier. I reckon they got about eight out of 10 on this one. It was not easy for the community to understand; it certainly was not easy for seasoned politicians to understand, because it was designed that way. Some would say, "Not much has changed when it comes to budget papers, because that seems to be the order of the day rather than the exception".

Mr Speaker, during the course of the Estimates Committee process, on some occasions it was very difficult to get straight answers to straight questions, and I raise one issue in particular, namely, the industrial dispute on the Acton Peninsula project site. This is something like a circus. When this began on budget day, Mrs Carnell wrote the dispute off as a fight between two unions. The unions wrote to the Assembly. Their response was tabled in the Assembly. It showed clearly that it was not a fight between unions; it was about jobs. What had happened was that the contractor for the Acton Peninsula project site had intended not to provide local truck operators with demolition work on the site. The truck operators were, naturally, agitated about that, particularly given previous commitments by Mrs Carnell that the emphasis was on providing local jobs and providing local small businesses with work. They were suitably upset about the way they were being treated.

When we got to the Estimates Committee, Mrs Carnell was still clinging to the line that it was a fight between two unions. In the end, she said, "It is not my problem. You should ask Totalcare". Her officers at the time, unbelievably, said that they were not aware of the details of the settlement of the industrial dispute. I find it impossible to believe that the Chief Minister's Department would not know the precise details of the settlement of an industrial dispute on a site as sensitive as the Acton Peninsula site has been over the years.

Mr Humphries: So you are calling them liars, are you?

MR BERRY: It is either that the Government has decided that they are not going to inform the committee about these things, or that Mrs Carnell's quite incorrect statement to this Assembly that it was a fight between unions was to be defended at all costs. It struck me as impossible to believe that officers in a modern bureaucracy would not know what was going on on an industrial site, particularly one as sensitive as the Acton Peninsula site, particularly one where the Government has an interest in making sure that it goes smoothly.

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