Page 2346 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 29 August 2007
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but it may improve efficiency. So we have this continued overreliance on taxes that are apportioned to business and to property. As I said last night and will continue to repeat, this is the Chief Minister who wants to build a bridge for the future. He said that the bridge for the future was the diversification of the economy, but he is making no attempt to fulfil the promises of the economic white paper, which of course was also put together by the Treasury.
The Chief Minister, when in opposition, also said that he would be more honest, more open and more accountable. What we have seen is a winding back on all three of those dictums when in office. The report that I particularly lament the loss of is the capital works progress report. The Stanhope government has denied the capital works quarterly progress report to the community for a number of very strange reasons. It was a valuable means of keeping the government accountable for a major portion of the annual expenditure programs. What makes me really angry is that this is a hypocritical decision because the government said it would be more open, and we have seen the winding back on that.
There is also the assumption by the government that we—that is, everyone in the ACT, except a certain number of bureaucrats, of course—are unable to read these reports, let alone understand them. We have one of the best educated, well-versed in public policy, well-versed in reading Treasury documents types of communities in the country. If any community can read these documents and these spreadsheets it is the ACT community. It is a ludicrous suggestion. It is insulting to those who have been excluded from reading these reports, particularly the community, as well as being a renunciation of the Stanhope government’s commitment to being open and accountable. It is also petulant and childish and it has all the hallmarks of a government that is afraid of scrutiny.
If you are carrying out your capital works and, as Mr Hargreaves said to the Assembly the other day, they are on time and they are on budget, you would not have a problem with tabling them here on a regular basis. Yet we know, for instance, that Gungahlin Drive is not on time and not on budget, and that is why the government is failing to table the capital works report that is put together by Treasury.
Daily there are pieces deleted from the prison. The 374-bed prison is now only 300. There are questions over so many aspects of the prison, but again we are denied that information because the government is afraid. It is afraid of being questioned, it is afraid of being exposed, it is afraid of being held up to the ridicule that the community will make of it for not keeping its promises. These reports must be returned to the public domain so that the government’s record on spending capital works money and its spending generally can be subject to the appropriate scrutiny not just of the Assembly but of the community at large. Treasury used to do that and I am sure Treasury still collects that data; the Chief Minister just chooses not to put it out there.
There is also the question of precisely who made the decision to hide these reports. Was it the faceless bureaucrat that seemed to be the sense of the article in the Canberra Times on 18 April this year, or was it a minister who is now not game to admit making that decision? Irrespective of the answer to this question of who made the decision, it must be reversed, and the person who can reverse that is the Treasurer.
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