Page 2281 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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It is signed “Pam Davoren, Deputy Chief Executive, Policy”—Chief Minister’s Department. Mr Deputy Speaker, I table the following document:
“Kama”—Proposed site for an indigenous-specific drug rehabilitation facility—question time brief, dated 21 August 2007.
Let us hope that, if Mr Seselja can read that calmly, he will come to understand the truth. There was no advice to me; there was no advice to the government. There is no written document in the possession of the ACT public service anywhere to me, to the government. Indeed, there is no written recommendation to any officer within the ACT public service that suggests that Kama was not an appropriate site for an indigenous specific drug rehabilitation facility. You are simply wrong. You got it wrong. You saw what you thought was a little chink, and your excitement got the best of you.
Let me go to the context of the documents that were requested under freedom of information. The question went to the LDA. The government, as such, does not make the decision. The LDA is an independent statutory authority. The documents were in its possession. The LDA—without reference to the government, without consultation with the government, as is appropriate under the Freedom of Information Act—exempted certain documents, particularly documents of agents making expressions of interest in the context of an invitation to be the selling agent. The LDA thought they were commercially sensitive, that they contained information around the basis on which individual real estate agents within this town bid for business—the computations they use, the methodology for pricing a job.
The LDA—as I say, without consultation, without taking any advice from the government—said, “Look, these are commercially sensitive documents. We can’t have private sector real estate agents bidding for business with us having their commercial bids released to the world.” So the LDA said, “We don’t want to do this to these four agents”—putting in their detailed assessments and the methodology for bidding for a sale job.
Do you think we should have? Do you think the LDA should have—that the LDA should have despite the commercially sensitive nature of this proposal? The LDA went out with expressions of interest: “Anybody interested in selling this property, if we choose to sell it, on behalf of the LDA?” Four companies responded. They gave detailed briefs on what their price would be and how they would do the job. The LDA—I would have thought quite reasonably—said, “That’s commercial in confidence. The Freedom of Information Act specifically excludes commercial-in-confidence documents from release.” So the LDA released every document in their possession but those four.
Then I was asked in estimates, “Chief Minister, will you release all these documents?” I took the question on notice. It needs to be understood that I did not say to the estimates committee, “Yes, I will release those documents.” Why would I—in the face of a decision by the LDA not to release certain documents because they believed them to be commercial in confidence—just say in an estimates committee hearing,
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