Page 2726 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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MR SESELJA: Clearly you do, because you are trying to shut it down. Despite the usual wide-ranging debate, he does not want to talk about the LDA. We know why. For the benefit of Mr Corbell, I will not spend too much time on the LDA. I will move on to other issues.
Mr Barr asked about our calling for more spending. We call for less spending; we call for the government to cut back in areas. There are so many examples of waste. When we raise some of these issues, Mr Corbell says, “It is only $50,000; it is only $100,000.” These all add up to a significant amount of money. I will highlight a few of them. The cost to build the temporary site office at Wells Station is one. It does not include the significant amounts of landscaping—$123,000 versus an industry standard of about $30,000. I note there is a unit for sale on All Homes today for $123,000. You can get a unit for the same cost as you are getting a site office at Wells Station.
We heard last year in estimates from the LDA that they did not do branding. Yet we saw earlier this year that they had this cinema advertising which cost them $115,000. It was not until the very end that they mentioned a couple of developments. The whole thing was an LDA branding exercise. They do not do branding, but they wasted $115,000 branding the LDA. The advertisement was run 188 times, apparently. It certainly got to a lot of cinemagoers. They found out that, yes, we have an LDA.
The wage cost of the LDA is $4.587 million. That does not take into account consultants. We are trying to get a picture of that. I note that, in the estimates report, which the government responded to, they said that they would table those figures at the next available sitting day. That was on Tuesday. I would have thought Wednesday would be the next day, but we await those with interest.
I pointed out the EpiCentre sign cost $50,000. That is unbelievable—$50,000 on a sign. When I highlighted that, the minister said, “We got millions of dollars for the site.” I will go into EpiCentre later. Apparently, according to Mr Corbell, if they had not had that $50,000 sign you never would have had those people bidding. Austexx must have been driving past one day and seen the sign for EpiCentre and that was why they bid. That must have been it.
We saw last year $4 million for marketing of the LDA. That is a significant amount. These are some of the areas where the government should be cutting back. I do not think there is a return. Where you have got a monopoly land developer, you do not need to be branding yourself all the time. You do not need to have lavish expenditure on signs and site offices. It would be great if we could see some cutbacks in the LDA over time.
Moving on to the Planning and Land Authority: firstly, obviously the most significant thing out of the budget was the 41 staff being cut from ACTPLA. I have not criticised the minister for this. Provided he can show us—and he has not done so yet—
Mr Corbell: You have criticised me.
MR SESELJA: I have not criticised 41 staff cuts in ACTPLA. I raised questions about it. I said, “You need to be able to show productivity gains as part of these staff cuts.”
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