Page 1468 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013
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I guess this is the moment we have been waiting for after the two hours of filibustering on the previous motion. This is an issue of significant concern to our community; I think that is well understood. It is an issue that has been pretty well litigated both in the media and in the Assembly over the past while.
There is no doubt that there is real concern about ACTEW and about matters surrounding ACTEW. The matters about the managing director’s salary, and the fiasco that surrounds that, and the quantum of that as described by Mr Rattenbury as outrageous—was it “outrageous”: it was actually worse than that, wasn’t it?—are a real issue. But it goes further than that. It goes back to the cost blowouts that we saw in the dam—the original estimates, about $150 million, with the cost now at $409 million.
We have seen the quite scathing draft report from the ICRC and the extensive comments about the management of ACTEW by the commissioner, Malcolm Gray; the concerns raised by the government about the corporate largesse; the ongoing bickering and breakdown in communication relations between the shareholders and the management of ACTEW; and concerns as to whether the shareholders have been meeting their full suite of requirements and, indeed, whether the management and board have.
It would appear that with ACTEW it is a bit like an onion: as you peel away one level, there are more concerns underneath. We have reached a point, members, where there is a full and comprehensive review required so that we can assure ourselves, as members in this place, that the shareholders and ACTEW are doing everything that they should be doing to provide effective management and oversight of that very important utility.
I think that it would be fair to say that there is no-one in this place, not even the shareholders, who could say with confidence that they know everything that is going on inside ACTEW, that they are confident with everything that is happening. Indeed, it is quite clear that it is the shareholders who are amongst those who have real concerns with what is going on and have had a breakdown in trust with the management of ACTEW.
ACTEW is an important organisation. It is the largest government-owned corporation, with $1.4 billion worth of assets. The Chief Minister and the Treasurer are the two shareholders. We would expect that that organisation is effectively managed and we would expect that the shareholders are fulfilling their responsibilities.
I will go through some of the issues that I just introduced in some detail, but one would expect that projects like the Cotter Dam would not have been subject to the variance in cost that we have seen. There has been a litany of excuses as to why the original estimate, at $120 million, $150 million, has blown out to $409 million. But whatever the excuses, it is unacceptable that a figure should have been put to the community that this is how much the dam will cost and then the final price be in an order of magnitude of hundreds of millions of dollars more than the price that was put.
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