Page 4776 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019
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This is a very important report of the public accounts committee tables today. It is a report on the Auditor-General’s Report No 7 of 2016: Certain Land Agency Development acquisitions. It was the coming together of a long and complex inquiry, which was made longer and more complex by the changing of half the committee halfway through the inquiry. It is a testament to the good work of new members that they got across the complexity of all these issues.
The Auditor-General’s report deals with four acquisitions by the Land Development Agency in 2015-16 of Crown leases and businesses in Glebe Park and West Basin, ostensibly to support the city to the lake project. The approach taken by the LDA in these acquisitions was inconsistent and not defensible. In some cases it paid considerably above what was indicated in valuations, and in some instances—thankfully unsuccessfully—tried to encourage valuers to increase their valuation. Some negotiations were characterised by chopping and changing by the LDA over an extended period while others were quick and easy and resulted in very favourable terms for vendors.
There are two different types of acquisition: the purchase of the Crown lease adjacent to Glebe Park was quite different from the three in West Basin. In the first case the LDA bought Crown lease when the land was being contemplated as part of the redevelopment of the Canberra Casino, the subject of an unsolicited bid by its owners, Aquis Entertainment.
For some reason the ACT government by way of the LDA purchased the lease when it could have left the matter to the would-be purchaser and the owner of the lease. While the $4 million that the LDA paid for the lease was considerably more than its most recent but not current evaluation, it is likely to have been far less than if Aquis Entertainment had dealt directly with the owners of the land in the knowledge that Aquis intended to use the land for an expanded casino precinct.
While it was said that the LDA acquired the lease in order to relocate stormwater management ponds, apparently with some urgency, the lease has been in the hands of the ACT government for the past four years without a sod being turned. Despite the committee’s best efforts, there are many unanswered questions in relation to this purchase.
For the leases and businesses at West Basin there was a series of irregularities. Negotiations by the LDA to buy the Mr Spokes bicycle hire lease and business amounted to a process of attrition. Over a very long period different positions were adopted by the LDA, during which the owners of the lease and the business were often not able to tell whether the LDA intended to buy or not. This speaks vividly of what happens when there is an unequal power relationship between governments and small holders and how it can go wrong. This business made a small but significant contribution to the tourism activity in Canberra, but there is no evidence that the LDA either valued or took that into account.
For the Dobell boat fire and Burley Griffin boat hire businesses the situation was quite different. In some instances there appeared to have been a short process resulting in
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