Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .
Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (10 May) . . Page.. 1389 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
There is another more basic element of the discussion and, given what I have just said and that the Assembly is being asked to note the Government's plans, I am being deliberate when I say "discussion".
We were having a discussion. I talked about other things and then said, "This can be a great proposal for the territory." That is what I said; that it can be a great proposal for the territory, and let us hope that it is. I repeated that. I said:
... this proposal could be a great one for the Territory, but its ultimate success will depend on the commitments offered being reflected in the final contract, on the Chief Minister abandoning the need to score political points and on an opportunity being provided to all members of the Assembly to genuinely consider issues around the payment by the Government of significant amounts of taxpayer funds to this company for the purpose of cementing the deal.
I then said:
That is a debate we still need to have. It is not a debate that we are having here today. We do not have all the information available to us. There are questions that still need to be asked and there is information that still needs to be provided-information that has been promised, namely, the Derek Volker report.
I went on and on. Of course, it now comes to pass that there was other information that was available on the day of the debate that we also did not have available to us on 30 March, namely the Access Economics due diligence report. We did not have available the ACTBIS board's recommendations. We have never been provided with a copy of the final agreement.
We, from our position on this side of the house, not having had the advantage of that information, are in the position that the entire community is in. We are forced to rely on the judgments and the decisions that the government has made. The government has made those decisions. It has made its judgments on the basis of the information it had available to it. It has made its judgments on the basis of the advice it received from its public servants and from the ACTBIS board and from Access Economics. As a result of all of those processes, the government has made a decision to expend $10 million on this project.
The deal is done. Let us hope it succeeds. I hope it succeeds. I wish Gerry McGowan and Impulse all the success in the world, as I do Terry Snow and the Capital Airport Group. Let us hope that we do get a humming, buzzing transport hub operating at Canberra, but do not suggest that this is a deal that was done in a unanimous way in this Assembly. With the information provided to us, we expressed that general support, that in-principle support, but we never saw the detail. We never got the in-detail information. We did not have available the Access Economics due diligence report. We did not have available the ACTBIS report. We did not have available the advice of the public servants that you had advising you.
Ms Carnell: Which is the reason we did it the way we did.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .