Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Deputy Speaker, I take a moment to congratulate you on your position as Deputy Speaker. This is the first time I have had the opportunity before you to offer those congratulations, so well done. We are very happy to have supported your nomination.
I want to talk about government business oversight because it is clear that oversight when it comes to our government businesses and state-owned companies has been lacking over the decade-plus of this Liberal government. We have seen a culture emerge around government business oversight of either indifference, incompetence, complicity or an inability to control them. I will run through some examples and acknowledge the review document that the Deputy Premier has just referenced.
We absolutely support reform of our government businesses and will engage in the process and have some ideas about how that can happen, but I want to lay out today some of the things that absolutely need to be addressed as part of that. When it comes to indifference, I want to talk to issues such as Metro Tasmania, for example, where the government seems to have displayed a reckless lack of care for its funding and ability to recruit and retrain staff in what we acknowledge as incredibly difficult and challenging times,
Tasracing is an entity that the government has spectacular indifference to some of the cruelty and animal welfare issues that are exhibited through the sports it administers and we acknowledge that tens of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money goes to propping up that entity.
When it comes to incompetence, we need look no more than the Spirits saga that has dogged the government these last months and the fact that it seems the responsible ministers simply could not get those businesses together to work things out and could not do the forward planning needed to deliver the infrastructure they need to do their work. How is it that we, as a state, can spend hundreds of millions of dollars, approaching a billion dollars, on two new ships that need very specific berthing requirements and we do not build them? It is laughable and it makes a mockery of the oversight here.
TasPorts similarly – we know the Devonport situation, but in terms of the Nuyina and wharf 6 down here on Macquarie Wharf, it is a ridiculous situation that not only do we not have a berth for that ship, but we have a ship that cannot even transit under the bridge to be refilled and do its work in Antarctica.
When it comes to complicity, this government is regularly complicit with its government businesses and a case in point is Forestry Tasmania. The government is complicit in the destruction of incredibly important biodiversity, habitat, carbon banks and the like and complicit in propping it up and subsidising it and cross-pollinating our government businesses. In 2014, when this government was elected, it insisted that TasNetworks do a direct equity transfer of $30 million out of TasNetworks into Forestry Tasmania to prop it up, and then in 2017 they were complicit in Forestry Tasmania flogging off public plantations at a fraction of the price it cost to establish them, simply to sustain ongoing native forest logging.
When it comes to inability to control our GBEs, the TasNetwork’s situation that has emerged over the last few weeks is a case in point, where TasNetworks, without any conversation with the public, has begun a tender process to contract out significant aspects of its work to a single corporate entity, with no consultation, no public conversation and seemingly even the minister did not know about it. The cat was belled by contractors. Some of us in this place got behind them and raised questions and articulated exactly where the problem is there. To the minister’s credit – I will give credit where credit is due – it does appear that he has intervened and forced TasNetworks to pause that contract process, because the issues that were embedded in that issue are some of the things that this review needs to.
We do not support privatisation. We need to watch our assets and make sure that this government does not flog them. There needs to be a significant conversation about the Public Trustee.
Time expired.
