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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 2092 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

By the way, where is the rug from the futsal slab these days? I have not heard about it for a while. I have not seen it down there. There have been lots of other things down there, such as tents. I see that Grease is on down there now. They are drilling more holes in the slab to bolt the big tent to in order to make sure it does not blow away. But where is that $30,000 rug? I have not seen that one for a while. It was last heard of in Melbourne, I think. We must find out about that. That is a question I must remind my staff member to ask. We will find out where the rug is, because it has not been on the futsal slab for a while, and it weighs a few tonnes. Mr Osborne seems to be suggesting that some of us with alopecia might be able to use it.

MR SPEAKER: Are you taking your next 10 minutes, Mr Berry?

MR BERRY: I will see how I go. I will not give you a guarantee that I will use the whole 10 minutes. Mr Speaker, we have to find out where that rug is. What about the move by CTEC to Brindabella Business Park? I see that the Estimates Committee devoted a fair bit of time to that, for good reason, and they concluded that it was not good value for money. They talked about how we should not be entering into contracts of 10 years length.

They talked about the fact that CTEC has a new and more generous standard than the government for the square metreage required for each of its public servants. That came out in the Estimates Committee. They are going to have a little bit left over. It seems to me that CTEC possibly have more than they need out there. It is hard not to come to the same conclusion that the Estimates Committee did, that we did not get value for money, but I cannot find anything in the government response about it. I heard that this report takes us to a new low. I would have thought that the government would have been brave enough to try to have a crack at the committee's comments in relation to CTEC's move to the airport.

CTEC have got into trouble with the GMC400, as we discussed earlier, with the added expenditure which was underestimated when the deal was first done. The $1.4 million, a portion of which we are yet to find out, goes to the owners of the GMC400 race and AVESCO. Because that is commercial-in-confidence, we can't find out about it. Then, of course, there was the imbroglio about the FAI rally, or whatever it is going to be called from now on. I think it is now the Subaru rally because somebody came along at the last minute, luckily, to sponsor the event. Well, one thing that that might have taught us, between that and all the tax leg-ups that were given to FAI, is stay away from insurance companies. I think that has probably taught us that. It would be a good thing to stay right away from them because we really have not got much value for money out of that contact.

Mr Speaker, CTEC have had a rough few years under this government. The government set out to establish a corporation so that it could operate like a business, and on the face of it you would have to say, "I'm glad it's not my business," because it really has not had a very good run.

Now, why is this so? Ask yourself the question. It is an independent statutory corporate and it makes its own decisions, one assumes. When I asked the chairman of CTEC who was making the decisions about the provision of papers from CTEC to the committee,

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