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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 9 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 2869 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: I suspect that you would need a bank of advisers to advise you on probity, Mr Quinlan. Mr Speaker, what we have here is extensive use by Labor governments in Australia of this very firm, not to mention the suite of other Australian advisers who presently provide services to a range of Australian governments. I do not have the figures, but I doubt that there would be any Australian government that does not use private sector advisers. As far as I am aware, none of them has a commissioner for probity. None of them has an in-house one of the kind that Mr Quinlan is advising that we should take up.

Ms Carnell: If we had an in-house one, we would be criticised for that.

MR HUMPHRIES: The Chief Minister is right. I ask members to consider this question: Who is more independent in a theoretical sense when it comes to advising a government on a particular major project: a public servant whose promotion within the government service could be viewed as being dependent-

Ms Carnell: They would view it that way.

MR HUMPHRIES: They would certainly view it that way. Is it a public servant whose promotion could be perceived by some to be dependent on how he or she performs in his or her work for the government-not wishing to offend political masters, you might argue-or a company which is independent of government, which has a contract to continue to work for the government and which, if it loses the services of this particular government agency, has a host of other government and non-government clients to fall back upon for its services?

Mr Speaker, the important feature about a company like PriceWaterhouseCoopers is that it needs to have a good reputation in the marketplace.

Mr Smyth: Is he accusing them of not having one?

MR HUMPHRIES: That is a good question, Mr Smyth. Is Mr Quinlan saying that PriceWaterhouseCoopers does not have an adequate reputation to do this job for us? I will interpret his silence as meaning no. Therefore, Mr Speaker, I think that with the very obvious quality of a company such as this we should be very pleased that it is playing a role in the ACT.

Mr Quinlan's media release further hinted-it did not really say, but sort of suggested-that the problem with our appointment is that we have a probity adviser who does not have a roving brief to go wherever he, she or it feels that they should go to inquire about the probity of a particular process, that it is called in by the government for particular projects-

Mr Quinlan: We had the fortune to have one on the ACTEW/AGL job.

MR HUMPHRIES: Exactly. We did have Mr Stephen Marks as adviser on the ACTEW/AGL joint venture. Was he from a private sector corporation or was he a government servant, Mr Quinlan? Which was he? He was from a private sector company-Stephen Marks Pty Ltd or something of that description. He was from a private sector company. He was not a government employee.

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