Page 4883 - Week 13 - Thursday, 2 November 2017
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
areas Mr Coe is prosecuting. They are, of course, the same issues that he identified in his budget speech in June and which he spoke about then instead of actually debating the substance of the budget.
There is a feel that this motion was about creating opportunities to say key phrases like “corrupt capital” and to talk about the need to clean up Canberra. But when it comes to the detail, the content is sorely lacking. I presume the local Liberals are using the same communications advice as Mr Abbott a few years ago in the period when he could speak only in three word slogans such as, “Stop the boats,” “Axe the tax,” “Lifters not leaners” and so on. The problem in a place like the ACT Assembly, and for a motion like this, is that the details do matter.
Let us go into the detail about some of the issues in Mr Coe’s media release. I will work through each of them. The problems with the Land Development Agency’s land purchases at Glebe Park flag serious questions. The Greens have raised similar concerns about some of the Land Development Agency’s land dealings, particularly the $25 million buying spree of properties on the western edge of Canberra with no community consultation, no support from the planning agency and no government agreement to a broader strategy supporting the purchases.
But the question we have to ask is: does lack of strategy actually equal corruption? I do not think that the community has that understanding. We have supported the Auditor-General examining those issues and will continue to support our integrity agencies doing those investigations. The Auditor-General’s first report was alarming, and she is now doing more investigations. Importantly, thus far there have not been any findings of corruption. There were definitely very sloppy processes in place within the LDA and in some instances simply no process at all. This is clearly unacceptable.
In fairness to the Chief Minister, his response has been strong. The Land Development Agency has been abolished. The two replacement agencies have completely different boards without any of the local industry links that people were concerned about with the LDA board. New chief executives have been put in place and these are also outsiders. There are now new internal arrangements within the government that separate land development functions from economic development functions.
The Dickson Tradies land swap is another of Mr Coe’s points. The problem with this one is that it is very hard to know whether or not the issues are real. On the one hand, we know from Glebe Park that the LDA had serious issues and that this is a complicated deal that seemingly has not worked out the way it was intended. On the other hand, every time anyone mentions a union, the Liberal Party gets into a frenzy. That makes it extremely hard to know what is the real integrity issue and what is just union-bashing. What we can definitively say is that the Auditor-General is looking into the deal, as I touched on earlier. I think it is quite appropriate that we wait for the Auditor-General to report as an objective oversight agency on matters like this.
Mr Coe suggested that through its connection with the Labor clubs, the Labor Party’s indirect ownership of poker machines is an integrity issue. Now, the Greens are the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video