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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (9 August) . . Page.. 2659 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

building and managing prisons. We did that to help us develop our approach to what the philosophy of running a prison ought to be. We did that to determine, and make recommendations about, what the ownership arrangements for this facility should be. They are all important elements of the early planning for a prison. I think we have come to some pretty good conclusions. I note that the government by and large has picked up on them.

Before we let this project go on its way, and before this particular Assembly ceases to be, there are a couple of warnings I would like to sound. This project is bigger than the Bruce Stadium project. It has the potential to be a financial success or a major financial failure. That means that the government of the day has a responsibility to ensure that the failings that were revealed in the Bruce Stadium exercise are not repeated here.

The first need is to have a proper financial and economic analysis done before the project starts. The government's record so far has not been very good. The committee tried for two years to get the government to tell it what the cost of this project was going to be. We were working on a figure of between $30 million and $35 million. It is only in recent weeks that a more realistic figure of $110 million has been put on it.

As our report records, the Rengain report, on which that is based, makes it clear that the costings it has relied on are only indicative costings. So we are not sure, even at this stage, about how accurate those costings are going to be. Bruce Stadium demonstrated the dangers of launching into a program without doing a proper economic and financial analysis first. I would like to impress on the government the necessity for getting the costings right before they even begin. There is always an element of risk in that, but it is something the government has to confront.

The next thing, once we get the money right, is to develop a proper cost control system. Without a proper cost control system, as we saw with the Bruce Stadium, costs can simply go through the roof. A good cost control system depends on good configuration management. That is, you design up front and you stick to that design. You do not change it in the course of the construction, because every time you do you add costs.

The third important thing is to have a proper management plan and a firm management structure in place. Whoever constitutes that management structure needs to know what they are doing. They need to be competent professional people in the field of construction and in the field of prison management. I do not see much evidence of that being put into place yet.

There needs to be a system set in place to ensure that the decision-making processes are clear and that the decisions are properly recorded somewhere, so that after the event, if the Auditor-General or somebody else wants to find out what actually happened, the records are there to support the decision-making process and the decisions.

There needs to be continuing oversight by the community and by this Assembly. Whatever arrangements are set in place, there needs to be continuing community and Assembly oversight, because of two things, one being the complexity and the size of the project and the other being the fact that we are dealing with human beings. We have to make sure that we get the right outcomes.

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