Page 165 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 December 2016
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2.2.1 of that determination states:
The following thresholds and decision makers apply to all LDA land acquisitions: a. below $5 million – agreement by the LDA Board with advice to the Minister for Economic Development or the Minister responsible for administering Chapter 4 of the Planning and Development Act 1997 …
Of course, that was Mr Barr at the time. Just a couple of months later on 25 August we now know that a valuation was done on this block of land adjacent to Glebe Park. The first market valuation put a value at between $950,000 and $1,050,000. For some reason, that valuation was not accepted, and about a year later in May 2015 a second valuation was sought. The difference is that this second valuation, which was called a “valuation advice”, I should state, was based on 122 units being constructed, and, therefore, a value pre-GST or excluding GST of $3.6 million to $3.8 million was set. It begs the question: why did the government think this was a fair valuation given they would have had to have approved any variation to the lease?
Anyway, there was a valuation in August 2014 that put the value at $1 million. There was another valuation a year later which put the valuation at closer to $4 million. A couple of months later the LDA board approved an approach to when Mr Barr’s determination for strategic acquisitions should apply. You would think it would have been pretty straightforward. When it says, “The following thresholds and decision-makers apply to all LDA land acquisitions,” you would think there is not too much wriggle room. However, the LDA board thought, no, they would like to give themselves some wriggle room, so they decided when “all LDA land acquisitions” actually means “all land acquisitions” and when it means “some land acquisitions”. That was obtained by freedom of information. It was quite a battle, to get that information through FOI. As you can imagine, the agency was not thrilled to release that information.
We now know that on 8 September 2015 a payment of $4.18 million was made to Glebe Park Pty Ltd. The following day the lease was surrendered for $3.8 million and a surrender of lease document was issued. A couple of weeks later on 24 September 2015 the opposition lodged our first inquiry in this place by way of question time. A few weeks after that on 5 November 2015 the LDA staff gave different accounts of whether Glebe Park was a strategic acquisition or whether it was some other form of acquisition—another form of acquisition that does not actually exist in the notifiable instrument.
A few weeks later on 23 November 2015 Mr Barr claimed that the purchase of the block was, in fact, business as usual. It was not a strategic acquisition; it was business as usual as if it is business as usual for the government to go and spend $4 million buying blocks of land around the city. About six months later Mr Barr denied there were any anomalies regarding this acquisition. In a committee hearing on 22 June I asked Mr Barr the following:
MR COE: Are you aware of any anomalies with the three parcels of land that she has highlighted?
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