Page 1470 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013
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It is worth while going back to some previous Auditor-General’s reports to see what the Auditor-General should be doing or what the Auditor-General could be looking at. I have gone back and seen the Auditor-General’s review of another territory-owned corporation, Rhodium Asset Solutions, in September 2006. The Auditor-General set out some definitions of good corporate governance:
… a set of relationship between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders. Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined.
But what the ICRC are saying is that ACTEW are groping around in the dark for what they should be doing. By that definition, is anyone comfortable that ACTEW is complying with that? In that 2006 report, on radio, she went on to note: “The benefits of effective corporate governance enhance organisational performance; strengthen shareholder and community confidence of an entity; increase the public reputation of an entity through transparency and accountability; encourage entities to demonstrate how they are discharging their legal, shareholder and ethical obligations; provide a mechanism for benchmarking accountability; and assist in the prevention and detection of fraudulent, dishonest and other unethical behaviour.”
I would have thought that that is the sort of review—a performance review on the whole organisation—that ACTEW would benefit from. There is no question that there is now a lack of public confidence in ACTEW as an organisation, and in some sections there is a lack of confidence in the shareholders—that they have been doing what they should be doing, fulfilling their responsibilities.
So why would we not want to shine that light? Why would we not want to get that outcome? What is it that we are hiding from? Or should I say: what is it that the government is hiding from? When we look at those objectives, there is some significant doubt in many areas that ACTEW is actually fulfilling some of those responsibilities to the high standards that we would necessarily expect.
Canberrans have read with disbelief about some of the corporate largesse, as described by the Chief Minister. These are her words: “corporate largesse”. She has written to the management of ACTEW about it, or the board. An extraordinary step! It is an extraordinary situation where the Chief Minister has either been given information or has heard rumours about corporate largesse and feels that it is necessary to write to the board to say, “What is going on? What is being spent here?”
There are stories in the paper about the chair going to be a VIP caddie for a tournament in Queensland at the cost of $12,500. Now, was that ACTEW or was it ActewAGL? But what responsibility is there by the ACTEW board to make sure that its investing in ActewAGL is judicious, that there is not corporate largesse in that organisation that is excessive?
How bizarre, how extraordinary, that the shareholders have reached the point where they feel it necessary to write to the board basically to say: “What the hell is going
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