Page 4772 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 1 November 2017
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stage of the bill I will be moving a range of amendments. Those amendments have been circulated and I will speak to them in the detail stage.
In conclusion, the government will not be supporting the bill without the successful passage of our amendments. I encourage consideration of those amendments in the detail stage.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.43): I rise to outline the Greens’ position on Mr Coe’s government procurement bill. I start by acknowledging and supporting Mr Coe’s focus on integrity. This is certainly something that needs to be at the heart of everything that we do in this place. It is something, of course, that the Greens have spoken about and acted upon for years.
As an aside, it was very good to see that the Liberal, ALP and Greens members of the integrity commission select committee got together with a unanimous position yesterday. The commission is something that the Greens have pushed for for years and we are very pleased that Liberal and Labor have come on board on this. I trust that it will make a very positive impact on integrity in the ACT.
Turning to Mr Coe’s bill before us today, it has four elements. I will go through them one by one. Firstly, I will deal with the notifiable invoices. The bill seeks to broaden the notifiable invoices register to include acquisitions of property and reimbursements. This seems to be a good idea from Mr Coe and the Greens support it. We think that it is possible that reimbursements are often already covered in invoices, but there is no harm in clarifying that situation. We totally agree that acquisition of property is also something that makes sense and should be included.
The second element I wish to talk about is the creation of an act of grace payments register. The Greens support in principle the concept that act of grace payments should be transparent and reported on. However, as we flagged when Mr Coe tabled this bill, we also believe that privacy should be maintained for people who receive an act of grace compensation payment from the government. These people are usually already in a situation of considerable stress or they would not be getting such a payment.
We have spent a considerable amount of time working out how to balance these two objectives. The problem is that in many years there are not very many act of grace payments. They would be in the single digit numbers. The full detail that is proposed by Mr Coe is clearly unacceptable. Disclosing the date, the grounds, the amount and the directorate relating to each payment would make it very easy for high profile cases—potentially cases of any profile—to be identified.
We also looked at other options. One we explored was the quarterly reporting of the number of act of grace payments and total amount paid by directorate. However, most directorates in most quarters would have either none or one. Again, this is just not acceptable from a privacy perspective.
In the end, we have not been able to find a reporting option that is more transparent than what is already done but still meets the privacy test. Unfortunately, on that basis
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