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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 3 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

each of these incentive packages given to business and then at the actual jobs created, one will see that there is a considerable gap. There is ever the promise, but very seldom do we see that the jobs created meet the original promise, and nowhere do we see any evidence that there is objective accountability in relation to the job creation claim anyway.

At two levels we believe that the Government has a lot of work to do to go beyond the fanfare of announcing a business incentive package and to get to the point where we know whether that scheme has been successful or not and whether there have been reasonable results. Maybe the Government will get a little bit better at it if they make some attempt to compile genuine ex post analysis of whether our money was well spent.

We have noted, and we believe, that leading on from the last lot of annual reports we have seen it is probably getting close to a matter of urgency that the Government provide the Assembly as a whole with a greater degree of information on the potential impact of the GST. I think there is an information gap that the Government ought to fill. It might allay a considerable amount of misinformation if we are all given a decent presentation by government on the potential impact of the GST on budgets, annual reports and the measurement of performance. We could then compare the annual reports of tomorrow with the annual reports of today.

Mr Speaker, there are a couple of recommendations the Government ought to take considerable note of. We recommended that the future of the International Hotel School be examined objectively. We want to know all of the facts and all of the potential there. Quite an amount of money has been spent, and is still being spent. There is ever the promise that things are going to be better tomorrow, but I believe it is time to re-evaluate those projections and for the Government to let the Assembly know exactly what its projections for the future of the school are and what projections they are prepared to stand by and, I was going to say, put their reputation on - but I do not think I will bother with that one.

There has been considerable overexpenditure by InTACT. It is now common knowledge that a consultant working with the InTACT group was paid the best part of $1m for consulting, at a rate of $4,000 or $4,500 a day plus travel allowance. Quite obviously it is not humanly possible to get value for money and, for the number of days, to get continuity of work at $4,500 per day. It looks as though InTACT was taken for a ride.

What is disturbing about that particular incident is what happened as we went through the very many consultancies that the Government had let. I asked about a couple of them because they seemed quite high. My questioning was not particularly probing, but I did ask what these large lumps were for. It turns out that this contractor had sent bills to government under two different names. This is quite obviously a ploy to mask the fact that so much money had been paid to one person or one entity. It is clear now that the officers and the Minister who were at the hearing knew about this case or should have known about it. The Minister certainly should have been informed, but that information was not brought forward. The committee was not told that these two separate bills that were asked about related not just to one organisation but to one man.

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