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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2278 ..
MR STANHOPE (continuing):
We continue to pay in other ways, as members would be aware. Totalcare, as part of its response to the coroner's report and the stringent criticisms of the coroner, initiated an external review of its actions, its role and its responsibilities. Totalcare commissioned a Mr Harmer to review its role in relation to the hospital implosion. We understand that Mr Harmer has prepared an extensive report on the actions, role and responsibility of Totalcare, particularly in relation to the tendering and the contracting, in relation to the implosion.
Members will recall that the coroner described the tendering process engaged in by Totalcare as a sham. "It was not so much a process but a process designed to disguise the fact that there was no process." I believe those to be the precise words of the coroner-that the contracts in relation to the hospital implosion were actually, in the first instance, let on the basis of a sham arrangement; an arrangement that was designed to disguise the fact that there was no process.
The interesting thing about the Harmer report into Totalcare's written response to the coroner's report is that Totalcare told us as late as last December that the Harmer report was on the verge of being completed, that their expectation was that it would be provided to the board of Totalcare within the first week of January, that the board would consider it at its first meeting thereafter and that the board would take a decision, hopefully at that meeting-namely, before the end of January-on whether or not to release the report. We are now in the last week of June and Totalcare remain determined, it appears, not to release the contents of that very significant report.
Totalcare was the organisation charged by the ACT government with the responsibility for the management of the process that led to the demolition of the hospital, which of course led to Katie Bender's death. Totalcare was the organisation at the heart of the arrangements that set off the chain that led to that fateful day, and that organisation is refusing to provide to this place, and through this place to the people of Canberra, an explanation of its actions. It is refusing to give members of this place and the people of Canberra an explanation of its role in those events. I regret most severely that this most traumatic event in recent ACT history, an event that did have a devastating impact, particularly through the death of Katie Bender and on the ACT people more generally, cannot really be brought to an appropriate conclusion until these loose ends are tied up.
We have now put the coronial inquiry behind us, but there do remain some significant other aspects of the hospital implosion saga, or disaster, that need to be concluded in order that the matter may appropriately be brought to some finality. Totalcare is an organisation that falls within the purview of the item we are discussing at the moment. We have running in tandem the fact that Totalcare will be vigorously defending the action by the Bender family against it and the fact that the Harmer report, which is an external review of Totalcare's role in the disaster-I think it is vitally important that we see it-has to this point not been released.
Proposed expenditure agreed to.
Proposed expenditure-Part 6-Central Financing Unit, $13,093,000 (capital injection) and $19,029,00 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $32,122,000.
Proposed expenditure agreed to.
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