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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1772 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

unknotting if it is to reveal the extent to which the Government and the Chief Minister have abused due process. At the very least, there have been fundamental breaches of the law that her Government has committed while she has attempted to talk and smile her way around, rather than condescend to consult this Assembly. The Chief Minister claims one law for herself and a different law for everyone else.

Mr Speaker, no-one on this side of the Assembly denies that the redevelopment of Bruce Stadium was born of a good idea, worthy of pursuit. It has always been obvious that next year's Olympics in Sydney would present opportunities for Canberra business and our community. They are opportunities worth chasing down. We would all like to be part of the Olympic experience, and so much the better if we could do it on our home turf. We all have memories of Bruce Stadium as the scene of great deeds done by Raiders and Brumbies teams. We all know what it is like to cheer our champions from the field and we all want to see them stay in Canberra. And we know the pressures on both organisations to stay viable. So, the redevelopment of Bruce as an appropriate home and one that might help guarantee their local futures was also an idea worth pursuing. But if you read the press clippings you will see that the seeds of the Chief Minister's secretive, can-do approach to the redevelopment were sown at the very earliest stage.

It will take me some little time, Mr Speaker, but let me run you through the sequence of events. On 30 October 1996, the Canberra Times revealed the $27m redevelopment proposal that was to be put to a SOCOG assessment team the next day. On 1 November, the Canberra Times reported that, while the Chief Minister and SOCOG delegates knew of the plan, others in her Government were taken by surprise. On 19 December, the Chief Minister and her sports Minister, Mr Stefaniak, announced that Canberra's push for Olympic soccer had been successful. Significantly, there was no mention of the redevelopment project in the 1996-97 budget and budgets are, as we all know, the usual method for the Executive to obtain the Assembly's approval for expenditure.

Bruce Stadium did, however, surface in the Government's draft capital works program for 1997-98, a report that was the subject of examination by the Assembly's Standing Committee on Planning and Environment, chaired by the then Independent, Mr Michael Moore. In the draft capital works program, the Treasurer's overview noted that the Government had earlier in the year:

Mr Moore's committee reported that officials had told it that two developers had been short-listed to provide financial packages. I quote from Mr Moore's report:

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