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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 2006 ..

to the community and congratulate members of the community on coming forward and saying to us what they were saying amongst themselves.

MRS DUNNE (6.07): Mr Speaker, this report is a cautionary tale—I knew a boy named Simon, et cetera—and a tale of mistrust, incompetence and the undermining of the community. The undermined of the community was not just of the trust of the residents of Fadden and Macarthur, but also of the status of Karralika and the work that it does. The real problem is that, in a ham-fisted attempt to maintain the confidentiality of Karralika, the reverse has resulted. In many ways, Karralika has been held out there in a way that is inappropriate, which goes to show that, if you are not open with the community, it will come back and bite you.

There are a number of issues in this report that need to be raised here. There are some good recommendations that I heartily endorse. The need for this Assembly to have a public works committee is something that the planning and environment committee has been considering for some time. There is no scrutiny of capital works by this Assembly, apart from looking at the list in the budget from time to time, and we have no expertise in actually looking at them and saying whether they are good value for money. One of the things that became apparent to us—it may not have solved the problem—was that if we had had a public works committee looking at this project after it came out of the budget last year some of these problems could have been nipped in the bud.

That might be being optimistic because most of the decisions were made before the budget was brought down last year. The preliminary drawings were done and everyone had a fair idea what was happening before the budget was brought down, but no-one told the community. It resonates a little bit: no-one told the community on 18 January, either. But there are some real problems here. There are some serious flaws in the administrative process in the way that public servants and officials have done their job here.

The one that is the most spectacular—at the time, one of the members said that they were gobsmacked by this—is that the chief executive of ACT Health said in the discussion with the committee on the application of regulation 12 that he:

…hadn’t read that particular regulation, but I had an understanding from this brief. I had no reason to doubt my officer’s familiarity with the relevant legislation.

The people who were advising the Minister for Health and Minister for Planning on the application of regulation 12 had not read regulation 12. The person who signed off the brief had not read regulation 12. Mr Speaker, I think that this was a fundamental failing on the part of officers who advise the executive, and the executive needs to do something about it. We have, in fact, made a recommendation that it is the responsibility of government to impress on the chief executives that, prior to giving advice, they familiarise themselves with the relevant legislation. I think that that is a searing indictment of the level of public administration in the ACT and it needs to be stopped now.

There are some very important things in this report. In many ways, this report should never have happened; we would not be here today tabling this report if we had as a community, as an Assembly and as a group of legislators taken people into our

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