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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1835 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

level of farce, we would not be debating this motion. We would have been concerned, of course, but we and many in the community are much more than just concerned now. We are incredulous at the series of events which have occurred. We are shocked at the lengths to which this Government has gone to try to get themselves out of the mess. It is obviously about winning and little else.

The arguments put up this morning from the Chief Minister only add more to our concern. The main argument appears to be, firstly, that ignorance of the law is a legitimate defence. The community will certainly be interested to hear that coming from government. I have heard the story already told here of someone speeding. The next time any citizen in this community is caught speeding, they could say, "I was not aware that this was a 60 zone, so therefore I am not responsible". What is also clear is that if these public servants have been acting in ignorance of the law this would surely show gross incompetence within the department, which should surely bring into question the Chief Minister's management of the Territory's finances and the department.

The second argument I heard was that there have been similar transactions in the past - for example, the loan to ACT Forests. The Auditor-General said in his statement to the Estimates Committee that he had checked all the loans provided to him by the Chief Minister and it appeared that all fully complied with legislation, except for the CanDeliver loan.

Thirdly, we heard that, because under the Financial Management Act there are mechanisms for expenditure other than by appropriation, therefore the Bruce expenditure is somehow legitimised. This is clearly a spurious argument. Of course, there are provisions for particular types of expenditure in the Financial Management Act, such as act of grace payments, maintaining supply and so on. But these types of payments are totally different from the capital works expenditure on Bruce. The logical conclusion from that particular argument that was put this morning would be basically that anything goes. I think we would not have to bother at all about section 6 of the Act. We might as well just delete it.

The fourth argument was that other governments in the past were found to have acted illegally and no action was taken against those governments. An example given was the money collected by governments as franchise fees, which was found to be invalid by the High Court. There is a very significant difference between governments acting according to law which was later found to be invalid and the Bruce case, where the Government was not even acting in accordance with the current law.

The final argument was that great emphasis was put on the intention of the Government; that its intentions were always good and well meaning. (Extension of time granted) From my reading of this saga of events, the absolutely clear and consistent intention showed by government in this matter has been to get themselves out of the mess they created in any way possible, and that is not necessarily an honourable intent.

While this issue is about the Government's appalling mismanagement of the spiralling costs of redeveloping Bruce Stadium, there is another important issue we cannot lose sight of. Expenditure on the redevelopment of Bruce Stadium has blown out to over $44m. This redevelopment has come at a cost to other government services. In the 1999 budget we have seen cuts to the college system and to CIT. We have seen environmental

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