Page 1058 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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I think that it does everyone a disservice, because most of what is in this report was agreed by consensus, by most of the committee members. All the recommendations, some of which had been modified to accommodate the wishes of members of the committee—I now find at the very last minute that half the committee is dissenting from those comments, after we had been through those recommendations and on a number of occasions recrafted them.
It is a less elegant report because of the last-minute changes made by some members, which I think are not in good faith and do not reflect the good faith in which I conducted negotiations to have a consensus report. It is disappointing. This is a serious matter. It is a serious failure of administration. There is no doubt that this is a serious failure of administration.
It is ironic that when the Auditor-General’s report was tabled the minister for planning, Mr Gentleman, said, “That’s it. It’s all over. It’s all done. Everything has been put to bed.” No, it has not. The extensive inquiry conducted by this committee shows that these matters have not been put to bed. They are not fully answered. It may be that we can never fully answer them, because the record keeping was so appalling in the EDD that there are countless occasions for which there is just no paperwork.
There are also problems about people’s memories. It is fair enough, to some extent: some of the witnesses are former public servants who do not have access to their diaries and their paperwork and are relying on their memory. Some people had great memories and other people had very hazy memories. There were almost comical occasions when people said, “No, we had nothing to do with this,” but when we did have clear paperwork their signatures were on it.
Some people claimed to have no memory of being involved in tender evaluations and this, that and the other. The litany and the description of looking for the paperwork would have been comical if it were not so serious. It was a like a Carry On movie: Carry On up the Directorate. It could have been cast with Kenneth Williams and the like, and Hattie Jacques. It was comical.
But it is also tragic that in a 21st century, First World country where you are conducting negotiations on territory land—not land owned by the ACT government, land for which the ACT government is the custodian, but land owned by the Australian taxpayer—the results are so opaque, so unclear. The lack of probity, the lack of oversight, shows that there are serious matters that still need to be answered and that could not be answered by the public accounts committee.
It is a great regret to me that the public accounts committee could not get to the bottom of all the things we covered. We know that we have not got to the bottom of it because of the conflicting evidence we heard over and over again. It is really a matter of who you believe. I do not know who to believe in individual cases. But what I do know is that there was a process that started out and went off the rails very soon after it was signed off. In fact, it went off the rails even before cabinet had signed off, because it was advertised before cabinet had agreed to it. Again, a comedy of errors: “Very embarrassing but we advertised before cabinet had formally made a decision.”
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