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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 8 Hansard (26 October) . . Page.. 2123 ..

Mr Humphries: That is rubbish.

MS FOLLETT: Mr Speaker, that is a fact. It is a fact that the Government has tried to obfuscate about, but it is the case that there was a bid for zero. The Government has said that that was not a conforming bid. In fact, all you had to conform with was a handwritten fax that gave you none of the detail whatsoever. Only the chosen few had had the phone call beforehand, including of course Harold Hird and Associates. Any other auctioneer in the ACT who wanted to express an interest in this would have been found to be non-conforming because they had not had the secret phone call. It is a fact that the lowest bid was not accepted, and it is a fact that the purchasing guidelines were not totally adhered to. The Government cannot wriggle out of that.

Mr Speaker, there is also the question of the reserve price and the budget projections for the revenue to be gained through this matter. We are only now dragging out of the Government the fact that they had halved the reserve price. A fortnight ago Mr De Domenico informed the Estimates Committee that the reserve price was $200,000 and he was hoping to get a lot more. Of course he would hope that way, because that is what we got in the past. It now comes to light that the reserve price had dropped by 50 per cent to $100,000. There has been absolutely no explanation for that, even though Mr De Domenico has had every opportunity to make an explanation through question time or through speaking from his notes. Mr Speaker, we have also heard that the Government's own budget projections cannot be relied upon either. They are saying now that they were just a mere indication of what might have happened had all things been equal. The budget documents, in effect, have misled this Assembly. Mr Speaker, that is another material fact that the Government cannot deny.

I want to come now to the question of the Auditor-General's interest in this matter. That is an area of particular interest. We have heard from both Mrs Carnell and Mr De Domenico repeatedly that they had asked the Auditor-General to examine the merits of this particular case. Now that we have the Chief Minister's letter to the Auditor-General we can see that in fact that is not so. Mrs Carnell said words to the effect that the Auditor-General will use this particular case as an example. That is in fact not what she asked him to do. If you look at the letter that Mrs Carnell has finally and belatedly tabled, you will see that all she asked the Auditor-General to do, with regard to not only the broader question of auctions and business in general but also this particular case, was to answer the question whether there should be guidelines for instances such as this and, if so, what they should be. She has not asked the Auditor-General to examine the merits of this case at all. Assertions by the Government that that is what happened are quite untrue. The Auditor-General, to give him his full credit, has taken it upon himself. So on another material fact of this matter the Government was wrong.

There is also the question of who conducted the auction last year. I have already said that if Mr Harold Hird's firm conducted the auction last year that is fine with me. He was not then an MLA. He was not an elected official. He was not a member of the Government. He was free to conduct business with whomever he wanted to conduct it. The fact of the matter is that the Government got that one wrong as well. The information that we have is that the auction last year was conducted by the National Auction Group, not by Mr Hird's company at all. On yet another fact the Government is wrong.

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