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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (2 July) . . Page.. 2168 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

The Government's response indicates that the Government responds to the National Competition Council's reporting requirements and does provide reports. I am not quite sure whether they are tabled, but there are annual reports. I would very much like to see those, and I will pursue their availability.

I am not quite sure whether the next issue is specifically relevant to the Chief Minister's Department. Perhaps it is not. It goes to the point that I was making about the response to indigenous issues. I am not sure that the current processes used by the Government result in adherence by ACT services and departments to the range of recommendations that were made in the black deaths in custody report and the Bringing them home report being reported on as fully and as well as it has been in the past. I believe reporting practices in relation to the black deaths in custody report - and I would now add the Bringing them home report - are not as adequate, as full, as meaningful or as useful as they have been in the past. It concerns me that there has been a slippage or a lack of detailed attention to the need for us as a community to be completely rigorous in the way we address the recommendations in those reports. That is a major concern that I have. I think we should report much more fully on those recommendations than we do. There were hundreds of recommendations in the black deaths in custody report. I do not believe our reporting on those issues is as good as it should be.

Those are some specific aspects of the Estimates Committee report. I would also like to add to some of the comments which my colleague Mr Quinlan made in relation to the proposal to amend the Appropriation Bill to deal with the retrospective payment for Bruce. I share the concerns that Mr Quinlan voiced about exactly what it is that we are doing. I really do not believe that the explanation that has been provided to date has been as clear as it should have been. I think it is a pity that we have not had the opportunity to address officials in detail on these particular issues, and it does make it so much more difficult to understand exactly what it is that the Government is seeking to do here.

The sums just do not add up for me, as they have not for Mr Quinlan. A paper circulated by the Government - I am not quite sure in what way or in what form, but it is a government paper - reveals a total all-up cost for Bruce of $44m, with a redevelopment cost of $34m, a total furniture, fittings and equipment cost of $6m, start-up advertising and marketing costs of $1.7m, and associated legal and finance costs of $1m. Today a retrospective appropriation of $27m has been requested. We add the $27m to the $12m already spent and we get $39m. We then add, however, the $6.6m, the $1.7m and the $1m and we do go to $44m. Yet the Chief Minister tells us that in the $27m there is a $5m component for working capital. When we add the $5m for working capital on top of every other cost, we now have a total cost of $49m. Nobody on the government side seems inclined to dispute that this is the current cost of this project. We are now up to $49m. We are pushing around $50m. We are now up to $49m.

MR SPEAKER: You are on your second 10 minutes, Mr Stanhope.

MR STANHOPE: We really must have explained to us that we are now up to $49m. It is intriguing, and I think most concerning, that in relation to Bruce Stadium in the space of this last week we have gone from $39m to $44m - that happened last Wednesday - and between Wednesday and Friday we went from $44m to $49m. That is

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