Hansard debates

Mrs McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (22:56): (1565) My adjournment matter is for the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change no less and concerns the Victorian Auditor-General’s (VAGO) recently published report Managing Conflicts of Interest in Procurement. It highlights a topic I have raised before—namely, Parks Victoria’s irrational hostility towards climbing, particularly in the Grampians National Park. We all understand, and climbers better than most, the environmental and cultural sensitivity of sites in the area, but rock climbers are mindful of this and have used these routes for decades without damage or disrespect. Unfortunately, without public justification, Parks Victoria now brands climbers as damaging and has taken disproportionate action to ban them from thousands of the best routes in this epicentre of Australian rock climbing.

I have never understood this blunt approach—locking up the parks and damaging a huge recreation with enormous health advantages and economic benefits—and I have been puzzled by its unchallenged prevalence in Parks Victoria. But last month’s VAGO report may go some way to explaining the groupthink which pervades Parks and the completely indiscriminate climbing bans which have resulted.

The Auditor-General concludes Parks engaged in inappropriate contract splitting and the misleading designation of a consultant as a contractor to avoid procurement and scrutiny rules. VAGO also reports that Parks failed to follow its own procurement procedures designed to avoid conflicts of interest. Its contract manager awarded a series of projects to a surveyor with whom he had recently co-authored two papers without declaring this conflict. It notes that in the four most recent contracts for the surveyor no competitive process was followed because Parks determined that, quote:

… cataloguing of rock art is a highly specialised role with [name redacted] being the only qualified person to complete this task in the state.

The proprietary process failed completely. Certificates to exempt the contracts from due process were approved only after the surveyor was approached in three of these four cases, and in two the work had begun before the exemption was even sought. I am concerned that the VAGO report says:

At no point did the contract manager declare their relationship with the surveyor as a potential, perceived or actual conflict …

This has to change, and it has to start somewhere. So the action I seek is for the minister to order a peer review of the work undertaken by this inappropriately engaged consultant.