Page 2714 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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There was a severe lack of organisation inside the government when ministers were appearing before the estimates committee and asking for hundreds of millions of dollars of ACT taxpayers’ money. They had, apparently, absolutely no idea what they were going to spend it on and how the budget had been constructed because they had not had a briefing. Yet Mr Hargreaves obviously sat through the budget estimates process. Mr Hargreaves was there when the decisions were taken. He either voted for them or against them, but they got through. But no, he could not tell the estimates committee about them because he had not been briefed.
That is fundamentally the reason that this line of expenditure should not be passed. The minister has not displayed that he has the wherewithal to implement whatever he is asking for money to implement because he does not know anything about it. It is illogical in the extreme. The whole idea of the government was to have some reform and the interesting thing is that when we went to staffing Mr Hargreaves could not guarantee how many jobs would be lost. He spoke about 100 FTE, but he would not say what that meant in terms of people or jobs because he had not been briefed and they had not started the restructure process and it would only be after it had finished that he would be able to tell us whether certain jobs were being lost. That shows the illogical nature of the appearance of John Hargreaves before the estimates committee.
The point that really concerns me with this department—others have touched on areas of their responsibility—is the whole issue of libraries and the fact that the minister would not rule out any library closures. He is having a review and is not going to rule anything in or out. There is a recommendation that the same number of libraries remain in existence. The one at the bus interchange might close when the new link opens shortly, but we said that we did not want to see a reduction in the number of libraries. But no, the minister who has the library portfolio is not going to tell us what he is going to do: “I am not going to rule them in and I am not going to rule them out. We are going to have a review.” He should have been able to tell us, given the budget that he has, how many libraries he will be running at the end of the year, but he chose not to. It was that level of obfuscation that really put Mr Hargreaves in a class of his own when it comes to—
Mr Hargreaves: Thank you.
MR SMYTH: It is at the bottom of the class, John. I would not be too proud of it. I think you brought eternal shame upon yourself and the whole process by your behaviour. People are more than aware of that. And then we got onto something like the Gungahlin Drive extension and I was beginning to think that this government is the government for hospital passes. We had Mr Corbell dishing them out, with Katy Gallagher getting the hospital and John Hargreaves getting the Gungahlin Drive extension. You cannot blame John Hargreaves for all that is wrong with the Gungahlin Drive extension. I think that it is left to Mr Corbell in particular to carry that. With Mr Corbell having flick passed the hospital pass forgotten his promise of on time and on budget, Mr Hargreaves inherited the Gungahlin Drive extension project.
Rumours abound round town that the GDE budget is about to blow out again, because the process has not been done properly and there seems to be some problem with the amount of fill that is either going onto the site or coming off the site. I heard a couple of weeks ago that it was being trucked on and now I am hearing that it is being trucked off
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