Grievance Debate

ZOOS SA

The Hon. I.F. EVANS (Davenport) (15:17): It has been a bad week for the Treasurer; it has been an embarrassing week for the Treasurer, followed by a very embarrassing day today for the Treasurer. I should apologise to the Treasurer because, if you believe the Treasurer, I keep on embarrassing him while I am asleep. If I start to wake, I feel sorry for the Treasurer.

How can a treasurer negotiate with the Zoo for five months on the understanding that the government had observers on the Zoo board, and for all of those five months there were no observers on the Zoo board? Not one—not one. Where did the observers go? Has anyone seen them? We could put out a search party. We are looking for the Zoo observers because the Treasurer sat there for five months saying, 'Don't worry, there are observers on the Zoo board.'

On 14 November, when the government announced their rescue package, the Treasurer made the intention of the government very clear: 'We will continue to have two government appointed observers on the board so that anything that comes up with regard to the Zoo we will know about through our observers on the board reporting back to government.' So, we are all brought to this view that the government is going to have observers on the board so the Treasurer is kept informed. Then we have the miscommunication. We have to bail them out to the tune of another $1.2 million.

Let's be clear, let's be crystal clear. The Liberal Party has always supported the Zoo and always wanted the Zoo to be kept open. I invite the Treasurer to go to the Zoo and look at all the plaques that say, 'Opened by Iain Evans, Minister for the Environment.' We support the Zoo and we want it open. What the public want is proper management of their finances.

It is simply unbelievable that the Treasurer sat there for five months and must have been saying, 'Gee, I wonder what those observers are doing at the Zoo? We're not hearing much from them. There can't be much happening.' Then, when he got the phone call to say, 'Treasurer, we need a $1.2 million bailout,' did the Treasurer say, 'I know, I'll ring the observers. Maybe I'll ask them. What do the observers think?' They were not there. It was the Invisible Man and Casper the Ghost! They simply do not exist.

The Treasurer comes into the parliament, and this week the tactics committee of the Premier's office would have been sitting there saying, 'What will that sneaky opposition ask us about this week?' I reckon the Adelaide Zoo would have been on their list. It was in the media over the weekend. I noticed I was on the TV—the Treasurer was not there much; so, in their tactics the Zoo would have been there.

We came in and we asked him a really simple question: what did the observers say? The Treasurer said, 'Well, actually, we had observers on the board,' etc. Then he comes in today and says, 'Actually, there were no observers.' If the public want an example of the clumsy misadministration of this government, look no further than their simple $1 million fiasco with the Zoo.

The South Australian public should not panic because, between the federal government and the state government, they are talking about giving Holden about $200 million. Who are they going to send in to negotiate? They are going to send the Treasurer in to negotiate. Well, Treasurer, I hope you have some observers there for that meeting. This is an embarrassment.

Then we had the other issue today. We had the Minister for Finance stand up and say, 'Well, actually, Treasury have taken back their IT out of Shared Services,' and he does not know why. The reality is that the two finance portfolios in this government are not working together and they are not working well. How can the Minister for Finance not know why the IT was taken out of Shared Services and put back to Treasury?

Surely that went to cabinet. Surely they are going to start unpicking Shared Services—that would have gone to cabinet. How did they not know? It has been a bad week for the Treasurer. It started off with economic commentators saying that we are in recession and it ends with the Treasurer saying he did not realise the observers simply did not exist.