Page 5358 - Week 14 - Thursday, 19 November 2009
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more incidents at all. It was a hot summer, but hot summers occur every year, and we are experiencing one now. Whether the AMC had opened or not was not going to change the weather.
The committee found that the major reason for the delays was the number of different players that were involved, particularly those who were involved representing the commercial entities—not sheeting this responsibility for the lack of communication to the minister at all.
As Mrs Dunne said, this is not a reflection on the minister. It was due to the complexities of the contract, the way the contractors worked together and how they communicated with each other and with the government agencies. If you look at the complexity of the particular project, you will realise how many people were involved in this project and how they communicated with one another, as we were given evidence about.
It is something that, as Mrs Dunne said, we can look at into the future. We can look at how these particular projects are so large, with contractors talking to one another across the communication lines that have been established without informing those above them in the line, that it has caused considerable confusion for people and, therefore, caused messages not to be relayed in a timely fashion to the minister and sometimes not be relayed at all to the minister. Of course, that will create confusion and misinformation.
We did recommend that this could be something that we could look at into the future, to ensure that the departments are given sufficient support to be able to make sure that this does not happen in the future. It is difficult to manage these large projects. I just make it clear that we know that the minister was not aware of these delays. And the delays came one upon another—for instance, quite out of the control of anybody, there was the arrival of a whole batch of switches none of which worked, which was another delay on top of many more delays. None of these delays by themselves were of a huge nature, but in the end they did create the situation we found ourselves in.
But they are not unusual in any large project. I do not think that people should go away from this place this afternoon and imagine that something terribly unusual has happened here. This is normal. My stepson is a project manager and I am well aware that in the large projects that he has managed—I have said this numbers of times in the committee—these delays are quite normal and quite to be expected. Unfortunately, as I said before, the communication at the time was a problem, because of the confusion with so many people being involved.
MR HANSON (Molonglo) (4.51): I have participated in many of the hearings. I will speak briefly on the report, which I have just had the chance to glance through today.
What is evident here is that Simon Corbell, as the minister, mismanaged this project. He then handed off his responsibilities for the chaos that he caused to his good mate John Hargreaves.
In the first 12 months or so in this place, I spent much time attacking Mr Hargreaves for the chaos that the corrections portfolio was in, mainly caused by the debacle
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