Page 3095 - Week 07 - Thursday, 30 June 2011
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differently now. What are the procedures? What have we learnt? What has the government learnt?
We have to be able to learn from these mistakes. We cannot just continue to accept that a $20 million blow-out here and a $50 million blow-out there is par for the course. Budgets should be kept to; budgets should only rarely be exceeded. That should be in extraordinary circumstances. That should be due to factors outside the government’s control. It should not be just standard, and it has become standard, particularly for this minister.
I call on the minister to come to the Assembly in the next couple of months and make a major ministerial statement about improved processes within his agencies, particularly about the delivery of major projects. I think there should be a better coordinated approach at a whole-of-government level to major projects. So perhaps the Chief Minister could make a statement saying how that process is going to be led, because I think the taxpayers deserve that. They deserve a government that learns from its mistakes, and there have been a lot of them. Some of them go back many years and some of them are very recent. The Auditor-General has put it on notice and we would put it on notice that it needs to show us how it is going to do it better. I think the community is sick of the excuses in relation to these cost blow-outs.
During the hearings it became apparent that Dame Pattie Menzies House has been upgraded by ACTPLA to a 4½ NABERS rating. Mr Savery said in the hearing:
As the minister has indicated, Dame Pattie Menzies was one of those that were deemed as an appropriate location where we could achieve certain targets and still get a return to government. We are saving in excess of 25 per cent of our power bills as a result of the enhancements that we have made, plus we have improved the amenity for workers, which improves productivity.
The government have been using a lot of excuses. They have tried to characterise it as “Well, you either build this new building or everyone can be in shocking accommodation.” That is the sort of approach this government have taken. Dame Pattie Menzies House, I guess through the leadership of Neil Savery, has actually shown that that is not the choice, necessarily. You can actually have an environmentally friendly building, you can have comfortable accommodation, without necessarily building a $400 million office block.
There are lots of options. I think that the government, on the one hand, are quite embarrassed about the fact that they have not invested in any of their stock for all of these years. In fact, the other really interesting thing about their office project is that if the office project is what they go ahead with, they are saying to all of those public servants, “We’re going to put you in better accommodation.” Good luck, because you will get better accommodation apparently under this government if you are there in six years time; then you might get better accommodation.
I do not think there are many public servants in the ACT who are going to be holding out for the prospect that in six years time maybe they will get better accommodation. Of course, in the meantime they are being told, “You can put up with the current standard of accommodation.” So there is going to be a real contradiction there if the
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