Page 16 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 9 February 2010
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She goes on to say:
The Government quoted these figures in various forums without testing them.
The question truly has to be asked—and I say it in the next paragraph in my statement; I will just read it:
The question needs to be answered—
it is a shame that the Chief Minister, who was such a strong proponent of this project, has left the field and abandoned the house—
how a proposal that “did not make commercial sense,” where ACT Treasury had advised the Government that the information supplied in the economic impact statement was “unreliable” and used figures “without testing them” was given so much support from the Chief Minister.
This is at the heart of the angst in the community. This is the problem for people. We had a Chief Minister who was out scouring for a project that did not make sense. It could be funded because Actew or ActewAGL could borrow the money. It could be funded, but it did not make sense. It leads you to the conclusion that, should the project not have made commercial sense, in the end somebody had to pay for it. Who was going to subsidise this project that did not make commercial sense? The answer is the taxpayer. The taxpayer would have done it through additional assistance directly from the ACT government, or it would have paid for it through reduced dividends from ActewAGL to Actew and to the ACT taxpayer.
That was the problem with this proposal right from the start. The Chief Minister got all starry-eyed. You have to ask: why was he all starry-eyed? He was told by his own officials, “It doesn’t add up.” He never asked the proponent, “Will it work?” He can explain his part in this, but you have got to ask the question. What these extracts show quite clearly is that the support lent by the Chief Minister was not based on fact. It was based either on poor judgement on his part or some political objective. The Chief Minister needs to explain that to this place so the people of the ACT can have an understanding of how he does business. That is why I say we should add process as a third theme. Clearly, the process here is a strong example of poor governance and judgement, or it was simply a purely political decision. In either case the Chief Minister has to explain that. I hope his colleagues ask him and I hope those in cabinet at the time asked themselves what due diligence we really did. Did we ask the hard questions? Quite clearly, they did not. That is a problem because the people of the ACT have paid for it in more ways than one.
The Canberrans for Power Station Relocation group in their submission asked for an apology. I recommend in my additional comments that the Chief Minister does apologise. It is a good recommendation:
I recommend that the ACT Government, through the Chief Minister, issues an apology to the Canberra community and, particularly, to the residents of Tuggeranong, for the failure of the ACT Government to take fully into account public concerns about the proposal from CTC.
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