Royal Adelaide Hospital Site Redevelopment

Mr MARSHALL (Dunstan—Leader of the Opposition) (15:30): Supplementary: can the minister perhaps indicate to the house whether the government themselves changed the scope of the proposal which necessitated the changing of the original proposal made by Commercial and General to the government?

The Hon. S.C. MULLIGHAN (Lee—Minister for Transport and Infrastructure, Minister for Housing and Urban Development) (15:30): I do not think I can make myself any clearer than my previous answer: that during the course of negotiations it became clearer to the proponent what the details were of the site, what was available to them for development, what the expectations on the proponent and on the development were from both the government and the community, just as it became clear to the government what some of the assumptions were from the developer which informed that initial offer against which they were ranked.

I should say that that initial offer they made was not only substantially higher than what was proposed by the other two shortlisted proponents but it is also fair to say that even their final offer was financially more attractive than what was offered by those other two proponents. We certainly feel entirely justified in making the decision to not just short-list those four, then three, but certainly enter into exclusive negotiations with the one and go through that process.

As I said in my first answer on this matter, by the end of the process we had a development which was on the table for that site and a dollar figure attached to that which we felt wasn't financially attractive enough for the government to enter into an exclusive right for that developer to develop that site and have full control over the development of that site.