Page 1471 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 10 April 2013
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on? There are all these rumours circulating. There are these allegations. We have heard this; we have heard that; we have got no idea what is going on. Tell us what is going on.” What a way to run an organisation!
Why is this not reported to the government? Why aren’t the shareholders across this information? Do they not ask for it on an ongoing basis? Do they not get it in any reports? Why not? Indeed, what have the shareholders been doing for the past 10 years? And in relation to the review that has been conducted, I believe the terms of reference for that review were set by ACTEW themselves. The concern is about the integrity of that process and largesse. Getting the organisation itself to set the terms of reference seems like an odd way of doing it. This is why we need an Auditor-General’s review.
It is similar with the managing director’s salary. This has been well canvassed in this place and in the media, but this has just been extraordinary—the misreporting of that and the quantum of that. There has been outcry from just about everybody in the community about what has happened—most vocally from the Greens, from Shane Rattenbury. I will get to his divergence of public comments on what happens when he meekly comes into this place later. I do not think that anybody, including the shareholders, is satisfied with what has happened. We need to get to the bottom of it. We need to make sure that we understand the systemic issues behind it.
I think that $855,000, by any measure, is an extraordinary amount. What happens when you do a comparative analysis with the director of ACT Health, Peggy Brown, and the responsibilities that she has got, in comparison, just in infrastructure alone? The rebuild of the tower block at Canberra Hospital was $800 million. There is a $1.3 billion budget. With the responsibilities that she has got, I do not think she is on half of that. These are the sorts of concerns that have been raised and that are shared broadly across the community. My understanding is that when that $854,000 amount was first paid, ACTEW only actually had 38 people. Extraordinary!
It was, in the original articles of association, an amount that was meant to be approved by the shareholders. It says very clearly in clause 49 that the shareholders are meant to approve that. The shareholders then basically wrote that out of the constitution. There was a constitutional change in 2006 that said, “We are not going to take any responsibility for that anymore.” Now they are complaining that they do not have any oversight of that. The very shareholders, this government, are now whingeing and complaining, saying: “We did not know what was going on. This is not fair. This is intolerable.” It was this mob, Mr Assistant Speaker, that got rid of any oversight on that, when they used to approve it.
Something that does need inquiry—this is something that I would have wanted the Auditor-General to look at, but it does not look as though she will be getting to—is that when those articles of association were changed and the new constitution was established, it was done by the shareholders, but the original articles of association talk about changes being done by the Assembly, about the Assembly doing those.
Mr Barr: They were tabled in the Assembly in 2006.
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