Page 1953 - Week 07 - Thursday, 31 May 1990
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MR SPEAKER: Order! The time for the debate has expired.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Ministerial Statement and Paper
MR KAINE (Chief Minister): Today I would like to present to the Assembly the report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Assets and Public Debt of the ACT. As members will recall, the report is in response to an Assembly motion of 28 September 1989. That motion required the Government of the day to commission an independent audit to determine the assets transferred to the Territory on self-government and the public debt associated with those assets. The need to identify the value and condition of our public assets and the extent of the public debt is of critical importance to the whole administration and financial management of the Territory. I sought to initiate this inquiry when this Assembly first sat in May 1989 and it was my motion, passed over the opposition of the then Government, which the Assembly passed on 28 September 1989.
Fundamentally, an incoming government, as with any business, must know what it owns and what it owes. The financial records inherited from the Commonwealth were not able to tell us this. A similar approach was adopted by Premier Greiner in New South Wales, and the resulting Curran report has proved to be a landmark in that State in terms of asset management.
Turning to the report itself, Mr Speaker, there are five principal issues which the report identifies. These are: the need for more effective identification and accounting for assets within government; the need for the central development of asset management policies; the extensive backlog of repairs and maintenance when the assets were handed over by the Commonwealth; the underutilisation of the existing asset base; and endorsement of the ACT's position both with respect to the debt profile to be assumed on self-government and the declaration of sites as national land by the Commonwealth.
Mr Speaker, the single most significant finding of the committee is that, although the Commonwealth has handed a large number of assets to the ACT, the condition of those assets was frequently poor, there was a significant backlog in repairs and maintenance, and many assets were underutilised.
Let me cite some examples. The committee was advised that the maintenance backlog for major buildings exceeds $26m. For the Institute of TAFE, it was over $2m, and for parks and conservation, it was $3m. For our road system, the shortfall in maintenance expenditure has been identified as nearly $30m. These are the liabilities, which are called "assets", that have been inherited from the Commonwealth.
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