Page 166 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 14 December 2016
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Mr Barr: No, I am not.
MR COE: You are not aware of any anomalies at Glebe Park or at the two sites by the lake?
Mr Barr: No.
That in itself was fascinating, because by that stage the Auditor-General’s inquiry was several months into its investigation. I then asked:
MR COE: Are there any positions or executives at the LDA whose role is untenable in light of the investigations that are underway?
Mr Barr: No.
Madam Speaker, we now know that the problems with this block of land are extremely serious. The opposition had a fair hunch there was a significant problem; that is why we did the title searches, that is why we asked the questions on notice and the questions without the notice and made the freedom of information requests. But there are numerous other problems which the Auditor-General highlighted in her report of late September this year.
A couple of weeks before the election, report No 7 of the Auditor-General was published. The report gave a scathing assessment of the government’s arrangements of the Chief Minister’s agency. The Auditor-General highlighted the manipulation of documents under FOI, a lack of transparency, a lack of accountability, a lack of rigour in processes and major issues around integrity and probity at the LDA. And this has been under Mr Barr’s watch for years.
Something that was a revelation in the Auditor-General’s report was the story about the FOI being doctored. It was only in retrospect that I found this out. One of the freedom of information requests that I submitted went to the LDA. The LDA found the documents they were to release, did not like that they had to release them and then doctored one of those documents and gave me a copy of the doctored document. It is a pretty serious offence.
In fact, it is quite possibly a breach of section 346 of the Criminal Code, which states that a person commits an offence if they make a false document with the intention that that person or someone else will use it to dishonestly induce another person to accept it as genuine and, because that person accepts the false document to be genuine, dishonestly obtains a gain, causes a loss or influences the exercise of a public duty. It could very easily be argued that my role here is that of a public duty, and I understand it is for that reason why the AFP are investigating this very issue—that is, whether Mr Barr’s agency has committed an offence of the Criminal Code due to doctoring documents before releasing them under freedom of information.
These are the sorts of issues that Mr Barr has been presiding over. Firstly, they are buying a block of land that had a value of $1 million and no right for residential development. They then valued it for 122 apartments being constructed on it, despite
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