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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1771 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
The breach of the law came about because of the actions of the Chief Minister in driving the redevelopment of Bruce Stadium. Her actions caused the breach; she is responsible. She has at least admitted that she is the responsible Minister, but has refused to accept that in failing to meet her responsibilities she has no option but to vacate the office she holds. She has now to face the ultimate sanction of this Assembly.
Mr Speaker, the redeveloped Bruce Stadium is an excellent venue. I find bay 69 in the eastern bowl a great vantage point from which to watch the Raiders. But what will be the true cost to Canberra, not only in terms of dollars, but also in terms of the damage done to the reputation of government and this Assembly by the unlawful behaviour and mismanagement, and the Chief Minister's secretive behaviour and contemptuous dismissal of the facts of the matter? How can retrospective legislation correct the damage done to this Assembly by the Chief Minister's past refusal to comply with the law? What damage has the Chief Minister, in her arrogant disregard of the law, done to the rule of law and respect within the community for the law and its enforcement?
Bruce Stadium is an excellent venue, but its redevelopment has been a fiasco. There is no kinder description. We have a new stadium, designed to seat 40,000 spectators at Olympic soccer games, but built to seat 25,000. We have a project that has to date run 62 per cent over its construction budget on the Government's figures. It is a project running 62 per cent over cost, when contemporary building contracts are written around a budget allowance of overruns in the order of one or 2 per cent.
The Government has spent more than $1m on refurbishing the kitchens at Bruce, possibly so that it can use excess capacity to provide cook-chill meals to the Canberra Hospital. It sold the right to the video replay screen and scoreboard to ACTTAB for $5,700 for the rest of the football season, when the business plan assessed the value of those rights at $780,000. Who knows how much the Government gave away in guarantees to the major tenants of the stadium - the Raiders, the Brumbies and the Cosmos? It is a deal that remains too secret for the long-suffering taxpayer to be let in on.
The Government promised a public exposure limited to $12.3m, a promise oft repeated by the Chief Minister. As recently as 18 February this year the Chief Minister told Mr Kaine, in answer to a question, that the $12.3m government contribution stood. On 18 February this year, Mrs Carnell told Mr Kaine that the $8m up-front private sector injection still stood. But now she proposes to ask the Assembly to retrospectively appropriate the entire alleged cost of the redevelopment, currently, according to the latest government figures revealed only this morning in the Canberra Times, $44.1m. There you have the extent of the Government's incompetent financial management of this project - a $27m redevelopment that so far has cost more than $44m.
Who knows what the end result will be? As Mr Osborne has said, it has been like pulling teeth to drag the detail out of the Government - the same Government that boasts about the importance that it places on transparency and now seeks to sponsor the creation of a parliamentary ethics commission. Critically, we have this mess to deal with - this mess of the Chief Minister's doing. It is a mess that will take a good deal of unravelling. The attempts of this Assembly to do that have not been helped by the Government's determination to hide behind inflated notions of commercial-in-confidence to hide any paper trail. But this is a ball of string that the Assembly will need to take some time
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