Page 379 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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will allow for ongoing unspecified development on any block of land anywhere in the territory, provided that it claims to be associated with the Hume development, within the merit track for developments, with no right of appeal.
Chief Minister, these are concerns on which your constituents—you represent all of Canberra as well—are very interested in hearing from you, and the silence is deafening. They are concerned about the fact that not only are they not listened to but they have been crossed off the radar as far as you are concerned. I simply wish to make a plea on their behalf in this instance to listen to the community. You did say that there were lessons to be learnt out of the last election. Chief Minister, I issue that plea on behalf of my community to listen to what they are saying.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.02): Gee, it’s a long time coming. I think the situation that we are in today, with this eleventh hour fix-up from the Chief Minister, reflects extraordinarily badly on the Chief Minister personally and on the whole of his government in the last Assembly, because as soon as the community and members of the Assembly became alert to this issue, the Liberal opposition acted thoroughly, expeditiously and carefully to try and improve the situation for the people of the ACT. In the process, it may have helped to let Mr Stanhope off the hook. We put together a process, and Mr Smyth led a process, that would have made this situation a lot easier a lot earlier. Mr Smyth in, I think, April this year introduced a bill which does pretty much the same thing as this bill does. What it does is to facilitate the movement of the development application from one site to another.
I cannot recall the number of times Mr Smyth offered the Chief Minister a briefing on his bill. I understand that Mr Barr did Mr Smyth the courtesy of receiving a briefing on his bill. I sat in the estimates process with Mr Smyth; I have sat in here with Mr Smyth over the ensuing months and I cannot count the number of times—there were many—when Mr Smyth said: “I think I’ve got the solution, Chief Minister. Why don’t we sit down and talk about it?” But no, Jon Stanhope barrelled on through here. And what we had delivered to us yesterday, quite fortuitously, is an independent assessment—not an assessment by the Liberal Party, not an analysis of the documents done by Liberal Party staff or anything like this, but an independent assessment—by a highly principled, highly skilled and, for the most part, highly respected public official whose job it is to report to this Assembly.
And what did the Auditor-General tell us? The Auditor-General told us—I will give a summation—that this was a flawed process. It was not at arm’s length. There was not enough information collected by the government. The government, while failing to be at arm’s length, embraced a project which may be of value, but they did not know because they did not have an independent assessment of that. As a result of that, and many other things, there were months of obfuscation, deception and the misleading of the community. There was the shameful process whereby a highly respected official was contradicted by another official in the estimates process—and you were there, Madam Deputy Speaker, when we had to recall a whole range of officials and the Chief Minister to come back and give evidence to estimates because these people eventually wrote to you as the chairman and said, “We got it wrong.”
Their getting it wrong essentially amounted to the fact that one person gave his assessment of what happened, he was directly countermanded by another official, and
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