Page 1928 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 25 June 2008
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The Chief Minister would give the artful dodger a run for his money. His favourite technique for dealing with criticism is to mount a huge aggressive personal attack on all critics, as he has really demonstrated today. Even the Canberra Times has had a slamming in the past and he thinks it is enough to declare roundly, as he did, on his return to the estimates committee:
Any suggestion that I acted improperly, had something to hide or, worse, strong-armed a consortium, that at a whim could simply have taken its business elsewhere is counter-intuitive, without foundation and profoundly offensive.
That quote was from the Canberra Times on 17 June. As my colleagues have been telling you, so far from being counterintuitive, whatever that means, and without foundation, there is a daisy chain of statements and contradictions by the Chief Minister, with two senior ranking public servants actually writing to the estimates committee to change their previous testimony—it is a shame that these people have been hung out to dry as well—because it was inaccurate.
The Chief Minister tries to vainly justify his mishandling of this extremely important project for the ACT. The Acting Chief Minister Katy Gallagher said:
The opposition will not be able to prove in any way, in any document that there was any improper involvement, or ultimately that the Government took decisions around this project specifically about where it was, because that is just not the case.
That was from the Canberra Times of 6 June. Unfortunately for Ms Gallagher and Mr Stanhope, we know, from freedom of information documents that the opposition has received, that ActewAGL identified block 7 section 21 Hume as its preferred site but later moved from that position. Why? Because the Land Development Agency had identified the Hume site for its industrial land release program. It was not, as the Chief Minister had said, that ActewAGL had rejected this site. The same FOI document showed that the ACT Chief Minister’s Department thought the Tuggeranong site was the best outcome because it would leave the industrial land available for the release to the market and—guess what—it could fetch between $30 million and $40 million.
Despite the protestations, the Chief Minister has not been at arm’s length from the decision to place the gas power station and data centre in Tuggeranong. He and his government have actually been behind the decision to place the gas power station and data centre right where they are proposing, and they will stick to it now, at Tuggeranong. Even after making that decision, they have continued, funnily enough, to refer to the site as being in Hume. I think they have even got themselves mixed up and confused.
Yet again, we have seen copious examples of the same old lack of transparency, the same old double dealing behind closed doors, hoping, no doubt, as they always do, to be able to spin it to the long-suffering public. But the whistle was blown on the involvement of the Chief Minister and his department by none other than the Deputy Chief Executive of the department, David Dawes, and the LDA’s Acting Chief Executive, Philip Mitchell, who, after saying previously before the estimates committee that the Chief Minister’s Department was not involved in the selection of
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