Page 370 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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This bill is a sign of changing times. I would like to say that it is a sign that the government is listening to the community but, more to the point, this bill is a result of the Greens-Labor agreement, which ultimately delivered government back to Labor. If the Greens had not ensured that a new site being found urgently was part of the agreement, the data centre project may still be going ahead on the Tuggeranong site.
As we have heard constantly over the past eight months or so, putting a data centre, and more to the point, a gas-powered cogeneration facility, just over the hill from a residential area and right next to a health treatment facility was inappropriate. The fact that—and the Auditor-General noted this too—the site was referred to as Hume for the initial phase of flagging the project was quite misleading.
I imagine that the proponents are also happy with this decision and the site. From a business perspective, they must recognise that, with such community dissatisfaction, the continuing bad media could possibly scare away new clients and could even compromise the financial viability of the project.
It is very fortunate that we find ourselves in this position today of having enabling legislation to correct a major procedural failure which could have been averted. We have here a general problem whereby a company with government shareholders, ActewAGL, was helped by the Chief Minister’s Department’s strategic projects facilitation unit.
Given that the Auditor-General’s report on the data centre site selection process was released just this week, we could not have this debate here today without mentioning it. It has some alarming information in it and I am sure that we will be hearing more about the process when the report is taken through the public accounts committee examination process. In particular, I would like to point out recommendation 5 which suggests a number of processes to prevent such a situation happening again in the future.
It is unclear whether this government is prepared to apologise to those people of the community who were criticised for raising concerns about the site selection process. We are certainly looking forward to hearing about mechanisms which will be put in place to prevent any future failures of process and failures to properly consider the public benefit. The concerns about this project have never been about our corresponding process but about the process which led to the project application being submitted for that block. Their invention of a land option process to make the block available to ActewAGL has been astounding. The Auditor-General notes on page 46 of her report:
This approach was not appropriate for government dealings at arm’s length with ActewAGL as part of the private sector consortium, and could expose the agencies to the risk of inadvertently disseminating relevant information that is not normally available to non-government entities. Similarly, government agencies on occasions involved ActewAGL as one of the government agencies in coordinating comments and inputs into government submissions.
Unfortunately many of the problems this project has encountered could possibly have been averted had the development application been lodged just one week later under
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