Page 4061 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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out by the Auditor-General in her report are acts of negligence. They are foolish acts. They are not acts of malfeasance; I would say they are oversights.
They are things that go wrong when you establish an organisation because it is something that you want to do at all costs and you do not think about how that organisation might work and how that organisation might interact. It happens when you do not ensure that the culture in the planning system is improved. It is what happens when you do not take control of the organisation.
This is a minister who has set up an organisation where he can take the glory. But when things go wrong he stands back and says, “No, it is not my fault; it is a statutory authority.” He does this all the time. He will step in when it suits him and he will stand back when it suits him. We started today with a whole lot of bluff and bluster from Mr Corbell, the planning minister, the planning crusader. It has been his beacon—the thing he has been most concerned about ever since he has been in this Assembly.
Today we see that he is a minister who is presiding over a failure. The failure has been brought home to us in the pages of the Auditor-General’s report. It is as I predicted in December 2003, when the Planning and Land Bill was enacted. Nothing has happened. Nothing has occurred to improve the culture of land administration and planning in the ACT. The proof of that is in the Auditor-General’s findings. I will read the sentence that I challenged the Chief Minister to read. He would not. The audit opinion at paragraph 1.16 states:
The clarity of the sale documentation could have been improved …
Yes, it is quite right that the report says that there was nothing underhand done, that there was no malfeasance. But what we see is a weakness of administration overseen by a weak minister who is obsessed with his vision. That vision is crumbling. It has been taken apart brick by brick by the Chief Minister. The Chief Minister has taken away some of the minister’s powers in relation to land planning. He is now making announcements about land releases. He is now saying that the LDA is not the only land developer in this town. Everything that the opposition said at the time was wrong with the LDA and ACTPLA has been brought to book today and has been reinforced this week by the Chief Minister.
Mr Stanhope: Balderdash!
MRS DUNNE: You have to commend the Chief Minister’s loyalty. He will come in here and defend to the death. He defended Ms MacDonald over the recent carry-on in New Zealand. He defends even when he knows in his heart of hearts that everything that I say is true. He is pulling the Land Development Agency apart brick by brick. If he had voted in the first place for my amendment not to institute the LDA we would not be in this place today. In the LDA we see a continuation of the culture that we experienced in the Gungahlin Development Authority and in other places where we saw failures that were not corrected.
The failure in relation to Yerrabi stage 1 cost the territory in excess of $1 million. The developer took the territory to court over the bad administration of a government
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