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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2349 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

report, what did I see on page 82? I saw that procurement guidelines were not followed. There were about a dozen comments by the Auditor-General about procurement guidelines not being followed. What do we find here? We find that in the very recent past procurement guidelines were not followed.

We have talked about the prison project. We have said that there were early warning signs there. It is to cost $100 million. I started talking about early warning signs two years ago when it was costed at $32 million. What did the Auditor-General's report talk about? It talked about early warning signs being ignored. Yet we hear repeatedly from this government, if it is not saying that the public service is to blame, that it has learned its lesson and introduced changes to the public service structures and processes to fix things. We are not seeing a lot of evidence of that, Mr Speaker.

As I mentioned in the general debate on the budget, what we had was just a shopping list. The government won the lottery, ended up with a bucketload of money and decided that it had better spend it before the opposition takes the Treasury bench from the government, leaving the opposition with nothing to spend. Sure enough, that is what the government has done. The amount left over, the crumbs off the table of $12 million or thereabouts, is going to disappear on paying for the HIH rescue package and the interest rate that we have to cover for borrowing money to build a prison. In fact, in the outyears that interest rate is going to be up around the $9 million mark, so I would estimate that in the order of $3.5 million will be required in the second year of the four-year program. Will it be there? It will not be if the people opposite have any say in the matter.

I raise that issue in the context of the section of the report on the Department of Urban Services because, if we look at the main headings for what the government proposes to do with the lottery win it had, we will find that it talked about innovation and it talked about poverty and early intervention. If we look at Budget Paper No 3 under the heading "Poverty", what do we find that Urban Services is doing about alleviating poverty? There is nothing in there, nothing at all.

I know that most of the people who complain to my office about things that affect them talk about roads, drains, garbage collections, bus fares and concessions. We had so much money in there that the people opposite could go out and just blow it. Why didn't the government allow concession card holders to use the bus services during peak hours? It would not have cost very much. It would not have cost much at all. It was certainly within the bounds of the leftover of $12 million. Maybe it was because the government knew that that leftover of $12 million is not going to exist for too much longer.

Mr Speaker, this government has been in charge of the infrastructure of this town for six years. I came to this town in 1968, having travelled all over the country and overseas. The reason I jumped ship and decided to make Canberra my home was that it was the prettiest place of all. It was clean and fresh. It looked like a good place to settle down and raise a family. One of the common themes that people talk to me about-indeed, it happened as recently as last night via the email system-is that Canberra is not like it used to be. What has happened, of course, is that this government, over six years, has allowed our infrastructure to run down. It is only when you go and punch them around a bit that they paint the overpasses, paint white lines on the roads, fix up intersections and mow grass.

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