Page 45 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 December 2008
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straightforward amendments to make the motion better, and the government has taken those on board.
The opposition is a strong believer that this Assembly, like all other parliaments in the country, should have a standing committee in relation to public works, given some of the failures in capital works that we have seen, especially in the Stanhope years, as a result of the inadequate scrutiny of public works in the ACT.
It is worth noting that, for instance, in the commonwealth parliament the public works committee is the pre-eminent committee and is not formed by a resolution of the chamber nor by the standing orders but by its own act of parliament. It shows how important the expenditure of public moneys is to the national parliament. I think it is the case that every other parliament in the country has a public works committee whose job, sole job, it is to scrutinise the spending on, especially, large-scale public works. We may not have had all of the problems that we had with the Gungahlin Drive extension if we had had proper scrutiny of public works in that area over a long period of time.
The Liberal opposition have for some time held the view that we should have a stand-alone public works committee and, as you will recall, in the previous Assembly we took steps to set this up. It was a policy that we took to the last election—it was a policy that was widely accepted—that we need to have a better handle on the way we manage our infrastructure. The record of the Stanhope government is highly inadequate in this regard and the scrutiny provided through the estimates process is insufficient.
I notice that the proposed Standing Committee on Planning, Territory and Municipal Services has a two-word reference to public works. It will not be high on the priorities of that committee because it is inherently a busy committee. I have been a member of predecessors of this committee. It is a very busy committee and I do not know that it will have the appropriate resources or manpower to deal with the very important issues of how we spend our public moneys.
One of the things that we have never done in the ACT since self-government is scrutinise the expenditure of public moneys by territory-owned corporations. We have been through one phase of large-scale expenditures by large territory-owned corporations, in the form of Actew, and we are about to see even larger expenditures in building of the enlarged Cotter Dam and the Murrumbidgee to Googong transfer. These are matters that should be scrutinised, should be carefully watched, on behalf of the people of ACT, by this Assembly. That is why we feel so passionate about this matter and why I now move amendment No 1 circulated in my name:
Insert new (1)(aa):
“(1)(aa) a Standing Committee on Public Works to examine matters related to existing and proposed capital works projects in the public sector, including works undertaken by territory owned corporations, and including the management and environmental impact of such works;”.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and
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