As more detail of Noel Tanzer’s relationship with the ACT Government emerges, it is becoming clear he was not a good choice to do the inquiry into the failed Canberra Hospital implosion.
Mr Tanzer is a former head of the Federal Department of Administrative Services. In that position and others in his 40 odd years of public service in the federal administration he built up considerable expertise in public-sector contracting procedures. In that respect he was eminently qualified to do the inquiry.
But he has been engaged in several other roles by the ACT Government. He was appointed a member of the ACT’s Centenary of Federation Committee. Nothing turns on that. Indeed it shows Mr Tanzer’s community spirit. He is a member of the ACT Remuneration Tribunal. This means he is involved in setting the pay scale of people in the ACT Government, the people whose conduct he will be investigating over the hospital implosion. On its own, this might not matter much. He was also on a committee that oversaw changes to a business unit within the Department of Urban Services between January and June this year. Totalcare, the entity that engaged the contractor to demolish the hospital, does a lot of work that used to be done by Urban Services. The links between independent inquirer and the things being inquired into get stronger.
Then we have Mr Tanzer’s consultantcy to provide mentoring advice to top ACT bureaucrats. That consultantcy was one of three. In 1995-96, Mr Tanzer received $10,500 in consultantcy fees.
The head of the Chief Minister’s Department, John Walker, said the arrangement was informal. The three consultants had long backgrounds in public administration. Rather than engaging accountancy firms he had engaged people with long public service records. He said there was a real wealth of public administration expertise in Canberra and the ACT Government should use it. That is perfectly sensible and reasonable. Mr Walker was quite wise to draw on the depth of public administration talent in Canberra to advise people in the ACT Government.
But then it has to be asked, why did he do this? The answer is for the perfectly proper purpose of improving public administration in the ACT Government. That is what Mr Tanzer was hired for, quite properly.
Now let us ask what Mr Tanzer is doing as inquirer into the hospital implosion. His terms of reference say he is to inquire into the processes followed leading up to the important decisions: to demolish; to implode; to chose the contractor which was used; whether appropriate safety terms and conditions were included, and so on.
Broadly characterised, those terms of reference are an inquiry into the quality of the public-administration aspects of the event, as distinct from the engineering aspects of the implosion itself.
It means that Mr Tanzer is going to inquire into whether the public-administration processes of the ACT Government sector were up to scratch or failed.
But this is the same man who spent part of 1995-96 engaged by the ACT Government to improve public-administration processes. He is, in short, inquiring into the adequacy of processes that earlier he had been engaged to improve.
Surely, it would be open for people in the ACT to say that the adviser on improving ACT public administration would conclude when inquiring into the adequacy of aspects of that public administration: “”Well, I did such a splendid job of advising that, of course, all the processes were adequate and appropriate.”
And this is aside from the question of being personally known by and frequently engaged with the top echelon of the ACT service which could give rise to a suspicion that he would do the right thing by them.
Mr Tanzer is in a position of impossible conflict. He must stand aside from this inquiry.
It is not a question of personal financial gain. It is not a question of personal impropriety. Or of competence. These things do not arise. Rather it is a question of perception and reasonable apprehension based on the facts that Mr Tanzer cannot investigate the issues impartially or judge the issues fairly.
If Mr Tanzer does not stand aside, any findings he might make that the processes were all appropriate and correct will not be greeted with a great deal of credibility.
The Chief Minister, Kate Carnell, was under considerable pressure to make early decisions after the failed implosion so that the people of Canberra could be assured that appropriate questions would be asked to find those responsible, if any, for the tragedy. At the time she was also under considerable political pressure because people were prematurely and/or inappropriately pointing the finger at her for making a public spectacle of the event or for influencing the decision to implode rather than dismantle. It may be that her knowledge of Mr Tanzer’s expertise eclipsed what knowledge she may have had about his involvement with the ACT Government.
A week later, that can no longer be the case.
If Mr Tanzer cannot see the difficulty of his own position and step aside, Mrs Carnell must surely see it and she should ask him to stand aside, perhaps expressing regret to him at not seeing the problem and asking him in the first place.
This should not be a consideration, but on purely political grounds, Mrs Carnell should see that continuing with Mr Tanzer is a lose-lose. If he exonerates the process the finding will be queried and if he damns it, Mrs Carnell will look bad anyway.
A comparison can be made here. The Government appointed someone from outside the ACT, Richard Burbidge, QC, to do the Vitab inquiry. It should have done so with the hospital inquiry.