Page 4935 - Week 13 - Thursday, 12 November 2009
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those answers on the table, ensure we get full information and not continue to bluster. (Time expired.)
It being 45 minutes after the commencement of Assembly business, the debate was interrupted in accordance with standing order 77. Ordered that the time allotted to Assembly business be extended by 30 minutes.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.15): What we have here today is an admission that the Labor-Greens alliance is alive and well. There was a little bit of a lovers tiff yesterday but, as I predicted, the champagne and chocolates have been bought and they have kissed and made up. What we have now is essentially a secret deal between the Greens and the Labor Party to ensure that the scrutiny in relation to this important public utility is at one remove from the Assembly.
What we were here today debating is the setting up of a select committee to look at this matter. This is, as Mr Seselja said, the largest cost blow-out in a public work in the history of self-government. It is a spectacular failure. This is about the amount of money that the ACT citizens are going to have to pay for water in perpetuity.
As the representatives of the people of the ACT, the people who should be looking at this matter are the people in the Legislative Assembly. The ACT Legislative Assembly has all the powers it needs and all the capacity it needs to look at these matters.
In the select committee process, we would be calling upon the experts out there. As Mr Baxter said this morning on the radio, he will be essentially subcontracting this job to experts. He himself is not the custodian holder of this expertise. He will be subcontracting it. Yes, he has powers to call for documents and things like that—as does this Assembly. Today we actually had an admission from Mr Rattenbury. Mr Rattenbury blinked on this. When he challenged Mr Sullivan about providing documents to this place, Mr Sullivan said to him, as he said to us, “I would fight that.”
That is not the point. This Assembly has the power. This is about the amount of money that people will be paying for water, year on year forever. We will be paying it until we die and our children will be paying for this until they die. Mr Rattenbury admitted that he blinked when he was challenged by Mr Sullivan saying that he might contest whether or not the Assembly had the power to call for documents from him.
Mr Rattenbury: I just found a better way to do it, Vicki, and you can’t hack that.
MRS DUNNE: No; actually, you have not found a better way of doing it. You found a secret way of doing it. Let us look at what Mr Rattenbury said last week. Last Friday he said that the Greens would move a motion in the Legislative Assembly this week calling on the government to refer the Cotter Dam back to the Independent Competition and Regulatory Commission, the ICRC, to review the price direction on water in the light of the cost blow-out of the project.
I know, as Sir Humphrey said, that press releases are not taken on oath. But at the same time, by the end of the day when Mr Rattenbury made this public commitment
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