Page 1938 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 25 June 2008
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considerable amount of the committee’s time at the beginning of the hearing. He said, and I quote:
In fact, my office was advised that this hearing would be from 10.30 to 12.
The time for the recall appearance was set out in bold in a letter sent to the Chief Minister on 10 June by the chair and it said:
The Committee would appreciate hearing from yourself … from 10.30 am to 2.30 pm.
The Chief Minister made a bevy of claims about his involvement or otherwise in the selection of this site. He made claims about the involvement or otherwise of his department in the selection of this site. He claimed that ActewAGL was not proposing a gas-fired power station in Belconnen, and at the summit of all this is the Chief Minister’s attempt to release his government from any blame or involvement by shifting all responsibility for the site selection onto ActewAGL. It is a desperate attempt to hide from accountability, especially in this election year.
The Chief Minister was careful to emphasise this in the estimates hearing when he said:
The facts are that I personally had no role in the site identification or selection process.
The Chief Minister’s biggest problem with all of this is that the paper evidence obtained under FOI, even as heavily censored as it was, sets the case that the Chief Minister was, in fact, personally involved, and so was his department, in the site selection for the gas-fired power station and data centre. Indeed, in a document that was published as a media release on 23 May 2007 he said:
I asked officials some weeks ago whether they might be able to identify land at Hume.
Further, there is paper evidence that sets the case that, in fact, a gas-fired power station was also proposed for Belconnen. An internal minute of the Land Development Agency dated 5 June 2007 identifies blocks of land in Hume and Belconnen and states:
The proposed use of the blocks of land is for gas-fired power generators and data storage.
This refusal to be accountable has become the hallmark of this Labor government. For more examples one has only to look at the government’s refusal to release the functional review that was so critical in framing the 2006-07 budget. More recently, we have also seen a critical report written by Mr Ellis in relation to fire emergency services. For these two reports, the government has hidden behind the invisible cloak of cabinet in confidence, directly contradicting its 2004 election platform undertaking to:
… relax cabinet-in-confidence rules to allow a more open system of government.
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