It is all about bums on seats.
This week the South Australian Auditor-General brought down a damning report on the plan by John Olsen’s Liberal Government to build a big stadium ostensibly to put bums on seats for Olympics soccer but incidentally to do favours to sundry construction and sporting interests who in turn would say, do and pay for nice things for the Liberal Party so it would have a better chance to gets its bums on seats in Parliament. Pity the long suffering South Australian taxpayer.
The story is familiar, except the ACT lost one Minister in the face of an Opposition and cross-bench with the numbers on the floor of Parliament; South Australia lost two: Tourism Minister Joan Hall and Cabinet Secretary Graham Ingerson.
The processes for both stadiums was deeply flawed. The phrase commercial-in-confidence was used to hide breaches of process and law and to hide facts from Parliament and the public.
There was one difference. The ACT Auditor concluded that Bruce stadium – at the end of the day – was value for money. We paid about $1000 a seat. The South Australian stadium ran to $4000 a seat. The South Australian stadium is a basket case – like those Third World hell-holes that build big monuments and stadiums to hide political ineptitude and poor service delivery.
The Third World comparison is deliberate. The smaller the level of government the more open it is to exploitation by big business to grandiose schemes to siphon public many into private hands.
The ACT Government – an amalgam of local and state government functions – has suffered grievously from these attacks. Both Labor and Liberal Governments have fallen under the sway of white-shoe-brigade, get-rich-quick schemes that hold out the promise of public benefit but in reality turn a private profit at public expense. They are usually not corrupt. They are often well-meaning. But they share the feature of the whole government, or even the whole Parliament, having the wool pulled over its eyes by a commercially sharp operator. It does not happen at a Federal level. Federal shenanigans usually involve a wayward minister getting into strife (radiologists, expenses, conflict of interest, phone card, GST payments for party functions etc). Whole of Government malfeasance tends to be relatively innocuous bending of guidelines of existing programs (sports rorts, centenary of federation, government advertising).
Some examples of whole-of-government failure in the ACT illustrate the point that it is not a question of whether it is a Labor or Liberal Government, but whether it is a state/territory or national level Government. They also show that the ACT is especially vulnerable. Sadly, not very much is on offer this election to change the position.
Under Labor we had:
+ The Vitab fiasco where part of the public asset (monopoly licensing of off-course racing bets) was transferred to private hands and the public paid.
+ The hotel school where public money was use to underwrite an unsustainable project.
+ Harcourt Hill where public land was given away too cheaply to private interests.
+ Gungahlin land development where land was sold to private interests without sufficient regard for the public requirements for open space and public infrastructure.
Under the Liberals we had:
+ The Kinlyside proposal where rural land would be converted to residential-rural without sufficient return to the public for the change of use.
+ The V8 race where public money has gone to fund a car race on public land without sufficient public accounting and over-estimation of the returns to the public.
+ The Bruce Stadium fiasco where public money was spent without parliamentary approval.
+ The futsal slab which appeared virtually overnight with no parliamentary scrutiny or assessment of return for public money.
The ACT taxpayer would be better off if none of these schemes had ever been dreamt of.
The real lesson for the ACT in the events of South Australia this week is the chronic incapacity of state-level politicians to learn from experience. South Australia had already suffered the loss of its state bank through misguided funding of big-ticket projects. South Australia’s stadium fiasco came after a litany of state-level fiascos with WA Inc and Victoria losing its state bank through poor investment in the Tricontinental venture.
Whoever wins power on October 20 must ask themselves some questions every time these sort of proposals come up: “”Do we have to do this? Would I be comfortable telling the public the full details of this whole project every step of the way?”
The main difference between state-level government and those in the Third World is that we have auditors-general, thank heavens (despite the best efforts of majority Governments in Victoria and Queensland to emasculate them).
These quotes from the South Australian auditor could apply to any of the ACT fiascos listed above and the next government should turn them into office wall posters:
“”No alternative to that [scheme] was given serious consideration.”
“”The Government withheld that evidence, making claims of commercial confidentiality.”
“”The income generated by operating the [scheme] has consistently been less than the cost.”
“”The Government committed to the expenditure of substantial sums of public monies with insufficient regard to existing controls for determining whether that expenditure was, in all the circumstances, warranted.”
“”At no stage was any adequate feasibility study or cost benefit analysis undertaken.”
“”It is not a case that adequate controls did not exist. They did. It was simply that they were repeatedly disregarded.”