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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (2 July) . . Page.. 2176 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

In tourism we have seen a litany of problems. We saw last year the terrible mess that was made out of the Floriade fee. This resulted in a massive reduction in funding available to tourism. The returns from the Floriade fee were down $800,000, hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Ms Carnell: No.

MR BERRY: You can tell us later what they were.

Ms Carnell: They could not have been down if there was not an admission fee before.

MR BERRY: They were down on the budgeted expectations. That mess damaged our standing in the Australian community and damaged our tourism industry. There were lots of complaints about it, and this year, though better handled, it is hard to imagine that this whole range of happenings has done anything to enhance our standing in Australia so far as tourism is concerned. Let us also recall for a moment the announcement in the Estimates Committee that future Floriades could be in danger.

MR SPEAKER: You are in your second 10 minutes, Mr Berry.

MR BERRY: What a time to announce it. In the lead-up to Floriade we announce that there might not be one next year or the year after or some time in the future. I think there needs to be a little bit more thought put into this. That was a thoughtless and strategically silly approach to take.

"Feel the power" seems to survive. Who knows how much we have spent on that one in one way or another. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been wasted on a program that it is hard to see any benefit flowing from. There may have been some benefits to the people who owned the slogan in the first place. They have done pretty well out of it. If there has been some TV advertising, I guess the people who put the TV advertising together and those who carried it out did pretty well out of it, but I cannot see anything that flowed to the ACT from it, though claims are still being made for it by the Government. I think they feel rusted on to it and cannot possibly detach themselves from it because of the massive loss of face that it would incur.

We also heard during the Estimates Committee hearing that the contract for the painting of the aircraft could not be enforced because the contract was not any good. That sends us a message about the operations of the Government. That contract was not any good. All of the business surrounding Bruce Stadium is looking a bit rusty and corroded. If those are the sorts of things that we dragged out from a government reluctant to provide information, it tells you plenty about what is going on behind the scenes. This sort of manipulation and can-do approach to governance in the ACT is appalling.

We are asked at this point to consider amendments to the budget and retrospective Bills to cover up for the Bruce imbroglio. At the same time we are denied a proper scrutiny process through another Estimates Committee. I remind the Assembly of the great weight the Chief Minister put on a second appropriation when her health budget blew out a couple of years ago. There was a lot of fanfare around a second appropriation to demonstrate that this Chief Minister was open and accountable, and where the budget

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