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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3654 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

As part of the process of preparing this report we wrote to all of the significant parties involved and invited them to attend or to make a presentation submission to the committee, and you would be surprised to hear that we received virtually no reports. We got two responses initially, declining to appear. We received four submissions, three of which were from the government, and one of them-I think it was from Arthur Andersen-said, "I think we were misrepresented by government."

In summary, the Auditor-General has estimated the actual cost to be $82 million. That is the net present value of all the expenditure incurred with Bruce. It is probably now an underestimate, given that we see supplementary appropriations of $1.7 million for one operating year.

The committee agrees that the Bruce Stadium is a stadium of quality. It does express concern, as the Auditor did, that the corporate areas are better serviced than the general areas. That is probably a metaphor for the Carnell/Humphries government: the corporate areas were well serviced and the general areas virtually got a change in the colour of their seats. A good percentage of football fans were alienated from the stadium because of the change in the configuration of the oval. Of course, the government then had to go and spend a lot more money on Manuka Oval, and the money spent on Manuka should be bundled up with the costs of Bruce Stadium when one looks at what this exercise cost at the end of the day.

The Auditor-General found that no comprehensive cost-benefit analysis had been done on this thing. Even though the government has decried his comments, there had been really no financial rigour applied at any given time.

I will skate through some of the findings. There are a couple of points I want to make. The first is that the whole exercise was underpinned by a financial model which was sometimes referred to as the business plan. It really qualified as neither. This report contains, for your reference, some dramatic figures which compare the forecast embodied in the financial model versus the reality of previous years, even years when the Raiders were winning premierships and having testimonial games, or last games on Bruce Stadium for Mal Meninga and naming stadiums after him. So the financial model business plan was clearly fanciful, and virtually every person involved in or associated with the redevelopment knew that those figures were fanciful but somehow everybody meandered onward.

That particular model was claimed to have been reviewed by Arthur Andersen in July of 1997, and I think even the Chief Minister at the time claimed that that was part of a probity check. Arthur Andersen was one group that did put in a submission to this review and they were vociferously disowning the use of their assessment as any form of meaningful document.

There has been significant comment made on the hiring agreements that were made. I suppose the significant point that should be drawn from that is that the government went ahead and settled hiring agreements with the major hirers even though those parties themselves were highly dubious about the predictions. You cannot blame the hirers for taking the good deal, but, certainly, the government did not negotiate very well.

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