Page 3528 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 September 2005
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taken this advice and taken us on trust and openly discussed education needs in Belconnen, they would have won plaudits from me and from the members of the community.
This piece of advice in the FOI documents is in stark contrast with almost everything else in the pile of documents that we have received. By contrast, a letter to the department’s director of budget and facilities by the acting manager of the facilities management section on 16 May this year states, in part:
There is no allowance in this timeline for public consultation with community groups or other interested bodies. This consultation will have to be done concurrently with progressing the project. It will mean that the designs will be approved with little or no input from these bodies.
Indeed, the acting manager goes further to declare that:
Consideration should be given to alternative approaches to reduce time in construction … there will be some inefficiency—
That means it will be more expensive:
in this approach but time will be the critical issue.
There is no room in the government documents for a comprehensive strategy, including extensive community consultation processes, which is what more thoughtful officials advocated. It gets better. The acting manager also blithely notes:
ACTPLA and building approval times are minimal. It is assumed that ministerial call-in powers will be exercised to meet the deadlines. If a project follows normal procedure it could be in the approval process for three times the allowed time and this will cause it to miss the finish deadline.
As Mr Seselja has pointed out, the approval process for Amaroo took four to five times the normal time. Of course, everyone is in such a hurry to build this school that there can be no delay anywhere along the line. To speed things up even more consultants are to be appointed on a single/select tender basis. This is for a $43 million project. The acting manager proposes that the design consultants for the Amaroo school should be commissioned without public tender. These, incidentally, were the same consultants who produced a so-called independent report in August examining their own earlier recommendations.
I should point out here that I am not criticising the company that was called upon to do this. I think the department of education has abused their relationship with the company and, by their ill-considered approach, has put the company’s reputation in jeopardy. They should not do these things. It goes on. The director of schools, northern Canberra breezily recommends selecting staff for one of the project teams, rather than advertising the positions. He says he would be quite happy to suggest specific names. This is all because of the extremely tight time frames for the construction of a new school. All of this was decided before the announcement of the mega school and, it goes without saying, before the charade of public consultation that we are now seeing.
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