Page 3201 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 20 August 2019
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Icon Water Ltd—Part 1.15
MR COE (Yerrabi—Leader of the Opposition) (4.46): Icon Water is, of course, one of those territory-owned corporations that I think we need to shine a much brighter light into. Whilst they have obviously got considerable expertise, considerable knowledge and considerable corporate history I am not convinced that the current structure of Icon Water is serving the city as well as it could.
To that end, I think we should be exploring the opportunity of bringing Icon Water back in house. We should consider making it a directorate or a stand-alone department here in the ACT. There will be arguments for and there will be arguments against, but let us have that discussion. We are not wedded to one view or the other but I think it is a discussion that is worth while having.
One of the issues that we have with Icon Water continues to be that of the Shared Services agreements. Approximately 10 per cent of their total expenses are attributable to the Shared Services agreements. Icon Water has previously advised that the contracts are supposed to cover their ICT needs but, for all those millions, the services contract covers a specified scope of technology and does not incorporate new requirements and systems.
Icon have essentially signed up to a contract that gives a huge amount of money to ActewAGL. You may think that that is all right; ActewAGL is a territory entity. Actually it is not. Only half of ActewAGL is in ACT taxpayer ownership. I do not see the other half owner of ActewAGL putting $25 million into that same entity through a Shared Services agreement. Therefore, for every dollar of profit for ActewAGL that comes as a result of the Shared Services agreement, the territory is losing half to their equity partners.
Despite the agreement supposedly covering all Icon’s ICT needs, they still have 17 people employed within Icon Water as part of their digital technology group to handle the administration of and support of assistance such as the asset management system, the geodatabase, cloud architecture, platform liability and cyber security. If you have a Shared Services agreement for ICT services, yet you still employ 17 people for ICT services, it begs the question: what is it all for? Are we getting $25 million worth of value out of this? The digital technology group is made up of the chief information officer, the enterprise architect, service manager, program manager and 13 administrative staff. Icon Water still refuse to advise the actual value of each of these contracts or provide any further information, and that was confirmed in estimates question 190. There are, of course, many questions that need to be answered.
This government likes to say that there will be no job cuts. They have had a few redundancies at Icon Water—a couple of high-profile redundancies at Icon Water in recent years—and I wonder what the terms of those redundancies are. I wonder whether all those positions were made redundant or whether it was simply a payment to move some people on. There are many questions that need to be answered.
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