Report 19

Opinions on Ministerial Notifications

Background

The three decisions to refuse to provide information to Parliament related to requests made to the Minister for Sport and Recreation on 10 September 2014, 3 February 2015 and 16 March 2015. In the time between the first and second question being asked, the Minister, the Hon Terry Waldron MLA resigned as Minister and was replaced by the Hon Mia Davies MLA.

In all three cases the Minister decided that the information sought was commercial-in-confidence and would not be provided. The Ministers notified the Auditor General of their decisions not to provide the requested information on 28 October 2014, 16 March 2015 and 23 April 2015 respectively.

The first request was made in the Legislative Assembly and was in 16 parts. On 14 September 2014, the then Minister, the Hon Terry Waldron MLA, declined to provide the information asked for in parts (a), (d), (h) and (k), which was:

(a)     Westadium’s anticipated internal rate of return

(d)     Westadium’s total cost of capital

(h)     expected income from revenue-generating opportunities to be managed by Westadium

(k)     annual payments by the State to Westadium

The second request during the Legislative Council’s Standing Committee on Estimates and Financial Operations’ (EFOC) hearing on the annual report of DSR sought information on:

  1. the expected net present value of the commercial opportunity revenue (see A5 in Table 1), which is the same as (h) above
  2. various annual payments under the contract (see A6 and A7 in Table 1), which are similar to (k) above.

On 25 February 2015, the Hon Mia Davies MLA, refused to provide the above information.

The third request also arose from the EFOC hearing. After the hearing, the EFOC Chair wrote to the Minister reminding her of the request for an unredacted copy of the State’s agreement with the Westadium consortium.

On 21 April 2015, the Hon Davies declined to provide the unredacted contract.

The full questions and the Ministers’ responses are included in Appendix 1.

 
Page last updated: August 27, 2015

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