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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (13 June) . . Page.. 1582 ..

MR HARGREAVES: In real terms, and I am happy to be corrected on that. In that case, the omission of this item would seem to be even greater because there ought to have been some contingency funding in the budget to pay for at least the overlap costing of the prison when it is being constructed. There was nothing in there, Mr Speaker.

Mr Quinlan: It involves planning, John.

MR HARGREAVES: It does, indeed. Mr Quinlan says it involves planning and we know they are not real good at that.

Mr Speaker, I was intrigued by one of the processes. When the committee felt there was something a tad smelly, it called for papers. I have to say that all the papers we called for were not delivered. The CTEC ones were not all delivered, neither indeed were all the papers on the Yellow Cab agreement delivered. There was either a slackness on the part of the people preparing those papers for committee consideration or a contempt of the process, which I suspect was in fact the case.

Mr Speaker, let me pursue that line. After the dreaded disaster at the Canberra Hospital-I am referring to the implosion, not the reconstruction-and after the debacle of Bruce Stadium, which claimed the scalp of the patron saint of the Liberal Party, Mr Humphries got up in this place and said they had learned the lessons of maladministration and introduced changes. Well, Mr Speaker, what happened when we called for papers on some of these issues? What happened on the CTEC issue? What was revealed by the papers in that case? Some really terrific administration!

What about the Yellow Cab issue? We found that there was a very strong smell of anti-competitive behaviour. We ask for a copy of the probity report. What did we see, Mr Speaker? We saw a letter from Yellow Cab's accountants saying, "Oh, the principal is a really nice bloke. He can run a second taxi network." Well, heck, that is a real probity check in my view! I sincerely hope that we can apply those same probity rules when we are on the treasury bench.

Mr Speaker, one of the magic numbers of all time popped up. I remember that the original number for the creation of the prison was $32 million. I remember it popping up somewhere else, but I cannot quite exactly recall where. And blow me down, it pops up that that is the price of the Gungahlin development extension. Maybe in fact $32 million is always the government's starting point. Officials had to come to the committee and apologise for misleading information.

What about the tender for the youth at risk program? Mr Speaker, a tender is required to be let on an amount of $450,000 over two years. But it has not been let. What happened when we asked to see a copy of the legal opinion on which the government is hanging its legal argument? We were told that it was a verbal legal opinion. The whole premise of the argument hinged on a legal opinion which was verbal. I think that says a lot about the quality of administration that this government is the steward of. (Extension of time granted.)

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