Page 1067 - Week 04 - Thursday, 21 May 2020
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Downer is valuable, but it would be more valuable if other land contiguous to it had been acquired. It has not been acquired, according to the advice provided by the agency to the committee secretariat as recently as last week.
This whole system is a farrago. Decisions were made which were specifically countermanded by the bureaucracy, and there was no oversight to bring it back on track. No-one, throughout this inquiry, could tell us who first suggested the land swap after the request for tender. No-one. The Auditor-General could not get to the bottom of when the issue came up. The Tradies could not tell us. The officials could not tell us. No-one could tell us. We do know that the request for tender was finalised in December 2012, but by March or April 2013 the land swap was back on the table, even after the government, in August the previous year, had ruled it out for the third time.
There is something wrong in this process, and because of the poor record keeping and the poor recall of these important things we cannot get to the bottom of it. It is the case that we are talking about things that happened eight years ago, but at the same time we are also talking about things that some people can remember very clearly. They can tell you how much money they were going to make for the ACT government and ACT taxpayers out of this land swap, even though they did not have any papers to support that. So sometimes their memories were pretty damn good and at other times they were pretty appalling. That is why this is such a monumental report, that is why it is so important and that is why this Assembly and this community need to take it very seriously indeed.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Report 12
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.48): I present the following report:
Public Accounts—Standing Committee—Report 12—Complaint regarding Auditor-General Report No 3 of 2018, dated 21 May 2020.
I move:
That the report be noted.
One of the distinctive features of the previous inquiry into the tender for the sale of block 30, Dickson, and the Auditor-General’s report was the receipt by the committee of a complaint from a person involved in the sale of block 30, expressing a grievance about the Auditor-General’s conduct during the performance audit. The committee’s second report that I have just tabled addresses this matter.
After giving this some consideration, the committee agreed that there could be a clearer distinction between the first and second phases of the negotiation, which is talked about in the previous report. As a result, the committee’s main report on the sale of block 30 details the two phases of the negotiation to show distinctions between them more clearly. However, the committee does not find the complainant’s other
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