Page 2439 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 13 August 2014
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Here we are again with the sanctimonious lectures, the same sort of stuff that we heard from Jon Stanhope in 2011—“Oh, you small-minded opposition. You don’t understand.” From Meredith Hunter we heard about triple bottom lines and all the rest of it. Of course, that all collapsed in a smoking ruin, but now we have the son of Darth Vader putting out the same lines again with the same sanctimonious lectures—“Oh, you don’t understand.” Well, Tony Hedley from the Property Council fully understands what this will mean. I note that Andrew Barr did not bother to mention what the Property Council said when appearing before the estimates committee, noting that we are cognately debating the estimates report today.
The Treasurer also failed to mention a few other things in his speech. He failed to explain why everybody has to be 10 minutes from the Assembly. I still do not understand that logic. It has not been explained to me why everybody has to be 10 minutes from the Assembly. I understand there will be senior bureaucrats that, from time to time, will come to the Assembly to meet with ministers and ministerial staff. Absolutely. But for the remaining 3,000 bureaucrats, why do they need to be 10 minutes from the Assembly? No-one has been able to riddle me that. Why is that limitation being imposed on this? What the government wants to do, of course, is skew it towards a particular solution that suits them.
The other interesting issue was that Mr Barr did not mention any approaches from Cbus, and I invited him when I was speaking to debunk that and say, “No, no, we haven’t been contacted by the union. This isn’t a matter of the union pushing for this because they want a big asset in Canberra that, although they would build it, the ACT taxpayer will pay for for 25 years.” I said to him, “Look, you can say, no, that’s not the case. That’s just salacious”—“fallacious”, that’s right—“That’s a fallacious rumour. This doesn’t stack up, that’s not true.” But did he say anything? No. I invite him—if he wants to seek leave we will grant it—to debunk that. Please do so, Mr Barr. No, he has his head down ignoring me.
Then there is the issue of light rail. Again, Mr Barr ignored that. He was talking just about office accommodation. But previously when he was making the case for Gungahlin, he said, “No, this is about getting people out of Northbourne so that we can flog that off and put it up for re-use so we can make a bit of money out of LVC, perhaps”—or not—“Get rid of that land. Sell it off so that we can then make the light rail project stack up.” No mention of that as part of his proposal.
There was no explanation, either, about the government’s strategy. The strategy is to have a hub and spoke and put some people out in the regions and some people in the centre, but then there is the complete disconnect of sending Shared Services the government entity responsible for whole-of-government issues—HR, IT, finance, procurement and so on—out in Gungahlin. Why do you have a strategy when you ignore the logic of that strategy? No response.
If the argument was. “Well, we’re going to put Shared Services in the centre to support the other directorates and the bureaucrats and policy makers of those directorates but we’re going to put one of the front-line services out in Gungahlin,” there would be more logic to that. That would fit with the strategy. So, do not come in here with the arguments about a hub and spokes when you are ignoring the strategy you have proposed.
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