Page 1510 - Week 04 - Thursday, 25 March 2010
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The Committee recommends that upon settlement of Block 751 that the ACT Government report to the ACT Legislative Assembly on the terms and conditions of the settlement, including the price of the block.
According to the minister’s statement in the Assembly on 18 November, EPIC had completed negotiations regarding block 751. At the hearings, the minister clarified that he was referring to “had completed negotiations within government”. So it is not complete, and the discussion outside the government was still ongoing. You have to question what the minister said. He did give the Assembly the impression that it was all over, and that things were progressing, when that was not really the case at that time. It is important.
There are far more mini-recommendations and there are far more mini-areas covered. I have tried to give a brief overview of a selection of them. It was a pleasure to work with the chair and Mr Hargreaves to bring this report together. I thank the members of the secretariat. Let me say to you, Dr Lilburn, as the senior person in the committee secretariat, that your staff are doing an excellent job in support of the public accounts committee. Glenn, we will miss you. The best of luck back in the Senate. I am sure that when a vacancy comes up here there will always be a home for you here. And of course we look forward to the return of Andrea shortly to take up her role of supporting the public accounts committee. I commend the report to the Assembly.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (12.06): I thank the members of the public accounts committee for this very thorough report. There are a couple of issues that I would like to comment on.
I would like to support Ms Le Couteur in her proposal to bring forward to the next meeting of the chairs of committees the issue of non-answering of questions. I note that the public accounts committee has devoted a fair amount of space and a number of recommendations to that issue. It was also something that preoccupied the justice and community safety committee during their deliberations. Although we actually have, I think, all the answers to the questions that we asked, it took a very long time and it was a matter of considerable trouble for the committee secretariat to be constantly chasing answers to questions. The amount of backwards and forwards between the Committee Office and the minister’s offices was an undue burden on committee staff. And it was interesting to see that, when we eventually got answers to questions, there were unexplained and lengthy delays from when they were signed off by the minister until, maybe a fortnight later, they arrived with the Committee Office. One has to wonder about the procedures in place when that would happen.
Other issues that I would like to deal with are those in relation to, you guessed it, the dam. The public accounts committee has drawn out some very important lessons that need to be learnt about this. We had the extraordinary circumstance where there was essentially a recall in relation to the costing of the dam after all the argy-bargy, after all the excuses made about the blow-out and the cost of the dam. I have to refer to paragraph 5.46, as Mr Smyth did. It says:
The Committee also noted with interest that as of 18 February 2010—
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