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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (11 November) . . Page.. 3955 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

a pollster came to Mr Humphries and said, "I have some bad news. Most of the ACT community think this is a lousy policy". So, Mr Humphries said, "Gee, how are we going to get out of this? I know. We will commission a report to say that our policy was wrong, and then we can back down". So, $14,000 was spent to commission a report to prove that Mr Humphries's original policy was wrong. If he had listened to the community in the first place, he would never have done it.

Then there is the $72,000 they spent on rates. At the last election, Mrs Carnell said, "We are going to fix the rates system. Trust us". They paid consultants $72,000 to come up with a solution to the rates problem. It had been on Mrs Carnell's table for five minutes before she put it in the bin. She said, "We are not going to do that. That is a bad idea". They spent $72,000 on a report, which is where? The terms of reference for the report were so badly structured that the report could not even be taken seriously by the person who commissioned it - Mrs Carnell. So, instead, they had a moratorium for another 12 months. At the end of another 12 months, what did they do? They implemented the Labor Party's policy from before the last election. So, after spending $72,000 and after two years of equivocation, what did they do at the end of that? They implemented the Labor Party's policy. Well done; what a great idea!

Then we have the $26,000 they spent trying to figure out how to sell ACTION buses and then lease them back. But they had a problem, because selling them and leasing them back depended on this little tax rort, where they could do some arbitrage between Australia and Canada and it was all going to be great. The only problem was that the Australian Taxation Office was not too keen on being ripped off. So, it said, "No go. It is all very nice for you; but we actually want to maintain the revenue of Australia", while Mrs Carnell was trying to figure out a way of leasing the buses offshore to erode the revenue base of Australia, just to make a few dollars for herself. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, they spent $26,000 on that. At the end of the day, they had to tear it up. So, they are the policy stuff-ups.

Then we have all the wasted resources spent on figuring out ways of disguising borrowings. I have just mentioned the ACTION buses. Then, of course, there is the Magistrates Court building. We spent millions of dollars building a Magistrates Court building; then we sold it to someone else so that we could rent it back from them. How much of the public servants' valuable time was spent on that? It was the same with the Dame Pattie Menzies Building. We spent millions of dollars building the Dame Pattie Menzies Building so that we could sell it to someone so that we could rent it back. How much of OFM's valuable time was spent organising that?

Then we have the ACT fleet, which the Auditor-General said was not an operating lease, as claimed by the Government, but simply a finance lease; that is, a way of raising cash. The Auditor-General said that we would raise $24m from it, and we were going to have to pay out over $30m. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, how much of the taxpayers' valuable money has been spent organising these charades - not to mention the charade about ACTEW, where we get a $100m dividend from ACTEW so that we do not have to borrow money? But we are going to borrow the money, lend it to ACTEW and ACTEW

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