Page 2197 - Week 07 - Thursday, 27 August 2020
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This is the final report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts which will be tabled in this Assembly and the final report that I will ever table in this place. Before I launch into this, I want to make some comments in relation to the committees. I think that there has been a tone in this place this morning that emphasises how important committees are and how important the work of committees is. I want to reinforce that today and also to reinforce the notion of just how collegial committees in this Assembly have been. I think that there was a rough patch in the last Assembly, where committees were not operating in a very collegial way, and I think that that time has come to an end and that committees have really hit their straps across the board for the quality of the reports and the thoughtfulness of the issues that have been raised across the board.
I commend members and the secretariat for the work that is done in committees and I take this little opportunity to note the recommendations of the Standing Committee on Administration and Procedure about committees in the Tenth Assembly. Unfortunately, I will not be here to see that happen. A lot of those recommendations have been things that I have been banging on about for so long. I think that under a Coe Liberal government the committee system in this Assembly will work a lot better than it has in the past because of the innovations that have been suggested in that report.
The Standing Committee on Public Accounts report on the Auditor-General’s report No 8 of 2018, Assembly of rural land west of Canberra, is a notable report. It is an extraordinary tale. Early in 2014, as a result of discussions of a planning day, the Land Development Agency became concerned that there was not enough land in the greenfield development pipeline. It was expected that if nothing were done, supply would be exhausted by 2031.
There were two main concerns: first, that there would be no more land to be made available to meet the demand for greenfield residential development; and second, that there would be a significant hit to the ACT government’s bottom line because the LDA would not be in a position to pay the dividend it was obliged to pay to the government.
At that planning day Colliers International was represented and they made a proposal to the LDA that it acquire several parcels of land in the rural area of Stromlo for future residential development. The LDA accepted this proposal and ran with it, putting up papers to the strategic board and cabinet. However, cabinet did not give a green light but asked the LDA to do more work and come back to it at a later time. The LDA never did that. Instead, without explicit authorisation, the LDA began a significant campaign of acquiring rural leases which, in the end, amounted to $43 million of expenditure. Some acquisitions were intended solely for residential development, while others were for infrastructure and some were for a combination of the two.
In so doing, the LDA often did not meet its obligations imposed on it by the land acquisition policy framework. That is a framework that the public accounts committee is all too familiar with, probably more familiar than was the board of the LDA. This
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