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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3655 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

The financing has also received considerable airing in the past, and I really have to put one comment again in Hansard that was part of the government's defence. It says, "Officials were operating in the real world with all the associated limitations and constraints on time." I have to ask, "What real world was that?", because it seems that virtually everything that was done in relation to Bruce Stadium was done on a fanciful base rather than a real base.

Within the audit report-I think it is report No 6-there is a very important comment that says that this government spent something in the order of $600,000 on consultants pursuing a financial model which only had the benefit of reducing information available to the public and the Assembly. I cannot stress that too much. In the order of $600,000 went to consultants to set up a financial structure which had the single benefit of masking information from the public or the Assembly. That rings a little bell in relation to recent debates in this place, does it not?

We have made reference in the report, of course, to the high profile illegal expenditures and the taking out of an overnight loan. Again, the only result that could be derived from taking out that overnight loan was to change the look of the books at the end of the year. There was no effect on financing, and nothing else; but again it was masking information.

In relation to that overnight loan, I think the government's defence was something like "a middle-level public servant forgot to issue some guidelines". That particular claim does not stand up. That is not an honest claim. It is quite clear that the guidelines that were issued later were issued under a section of the Financial Management Act that has nothing to do with this sort of investment anyway. It only had to do with allowing the government to manage its day to day cash surpluses. I guess that sort of elasticity in administrative procedure is again a hallmark of what happened at Bruce, and a hallmark of what was happening generally in this town.

One of the great unanswered questions, even though we have 10 or 11 centimetres of audit report, is: why did the government select the project manager that it selected? We have all seen the report. We have all seen the repeated references to lack of documentation. There is insufficient documentation to pin down a reason. How we managed to appoint one body on an open-ended contract when we were offered a fixed price contract by a very reputable, well-known national firm remains an unanswered question.

I have to say at this point that since the Bruce Stadium revelations there has been this effort to change the public sector to public sector renewal. That is the claim. I have specifically asked the Auditor-General whether the procedures and practices at the time were sufficient to avoid the fiasco that occurred, and the answer was clearly yes. It was not the prevailing practices and guidelines that caused this problem. I have to say that it was clearly not the fault of an administration gone wrong. It was clearly the result of a culture that emanated from the highest level of government in this town and that may have pervaded a couple of the elements of the administration, but no more. It is disappointing to see the spotlight still pushed onto the innocent survivors within the administration as opposed to those that were directly responsible.

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