Page 316 - Week 01 - Thursday, 16 February 2012
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in terms of an infrastructure project, with such inconsistencies and such falsehoods perpetuated by this government time and time again, what is it we look into in relation to this government? If we will not do it on a $430 million project that they claimed would save taxpayers $34.5 million a year, this Assembly is not fair dinkum; this Assembly is not serious if we will not hold this government to account for such a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and such a massive deception perpetrated on the people of the ACT.
We have seen that the process recently chosen by Mr Barr was excluded as an option in the initial process. So, again, what kind of a process did we have? How much were they being steered to the government’s desired end, without regard to what was the best process or the best outcome, and how much were they then backfilling the numbers in order to justify that flawed process? How can we take anything seriously put forward by the Labor Party in this place, by Katy Gallagher and Andrew Barr? When they come and present the budget this year, are we really going to believe the numbers? How many of those numbers are we going to be able to believe? They have thoroughly politicised the process on their largest proposed infrastructure project ever. On the largest proposed infrastructure project this government were ever going to pursue, they made the figures up. And they will make them up again, and that is why an inquiry is necessary, to get to the bottom of just how they were allowed to get away with that, who made those judgements to just pluck figures out of thin air, where those figures were derived from, why they continue to mislead the people, and why they wasted millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money while doing it.
It is absolutely imperative that the Assembly does its job. If we do not do the job of this kind of financial analysis and holding a government to account when it simply deliberately misleads the community and when it wastes millions of dollars, we should not be here.
The analysis did not include the potential sale value of the land, the stamp duty collection from this, or the potential rental incentives from a long-term lease. This has been a shoddy process—a shoddy process from start to finish by a shoddy government. We saw the floor efficiency adjustment of six per cent or 3,960 square metres. Consultants were just told to assume efficiency of 88 per cent when the building was only designed to achieve 83 per cent. So they made up six per cent of the building in terms of how it was going to be delivered. They just made it up. They said: “This is our design. We have done all this detailed design work. It has cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. But don’t worry about the design work we have done; we’re going to ignore it because it doesn’t suit our numbers.” You cannot be taken seriously.
The estimates committee raised these concerns and all the committee found the information and explanations provided by the government confusing. During hearings the committee was told that other directorates would be able to answer specific questions, but the committee continued to find it difficult to obtain a satisfactory level of detail. Those are very mild words and that is from a committee where the Greens are doing their best not to critique the government. But even then they had to conclude that the government was doing its best to avoid scrutiny. And now we know why: because they were making it up; they were making it up as they went along. We could see it at the time but it is now here for everyone to see, and it was confirmed when the government walked away from it.
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