Page 1223 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 24 March 2009
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Not only does the jail show wasted expenditure; it shows a gross mismanagement of projects which is sheer incompetence. Indeed, it reads like Canberra’s very own live episode of Yes, Minister. We have a prison but no prisoners, because prisoners would get in the way of the efficient running of the prisons.
Then there is the extraordinary cost of the Bimberi centre. Bimberi is an important facility in the ACT, but it does leave people in the ACT scratching their heads at the per-bed cost of $1 million. People often scratch their heads about the $400,000-odd per-bed cost for the Alexander Maconochie Centre; but we have to remember that Bimberi costs the taxpayer twice as much—more than twice as much per bed as the AMC. At any one time there are 40 beds in that facility. It was originally proposed that that would be a $20 million facility; then it became a $40 million facility and eventually it became nearly a $44 million facility. The list goes on.
In addition to that, we have to look at the Stanhope government’s incapacity to collect money that is owed to it. We have seen that with the torch relay. The Chief Minister went on and on about how we would collect this money. It has now quietly gone under the radar. They have Buckley’s chance of getting that money back from the commonwealth. It does leave open the question of how much money the Stanhope government will eventually receive in relation to liquidated damages in relation to the prison.
The list of wastage goes on and on. Some of the more current ones are the $40,000 contract to deliver the “art of fun” team building training for JACS staff and another $20,000 for “getting there first” training for JACS staff. These are the costs available on the government’s website, but it does not indicate how much money was spent in transporting people to these courses and whether there needed to be fill-ins to allow people to go on courses, whether there was overtime available et cetera.
Over the last eight years, this government has had a record of behaviour which has caused morale at JACS to plummet. It has made substantial changes to JACS. When we have got to the absolute nadir of morale in the department, we come along and we have team building exercises as a means of turning around the morale in a department which has been diminished substantially by the work of the Stanhope-Gallagher government.
And can we forget the waste of public moneys on the Grassby statue or the poorly targeted per cent for art scheme, which, as we all know, is not even targeted towards ACT artists. I spend a lot of time—and it is a great privilege for me—going around the arts community and attending galleries and artistic events around the place. The per cent for art scheme is a constant topic of conversation. The criticisms of it centre on two things: that the per cent for art scheme is only for public art—so there is nothing for theatre, nothing for dance and nothing for the written word—and the fact that it does not in any way support Canberra artists. Many of the pieces that have been bought through the public arts scheme are off-the-shelf pieces from overseas or interstate artists. This is something that the people of the ACT object to very strongly. In addition to the dubious taste of some of the items put up, there is the sheer waste of money and the fact that that money is directed away from the ACT.
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