Barnett transparency claim takes on a cloudy look
BGC will pay about $8 million for the 7300sqm site, but the Department of Fire and Emergency Services will get about $32 million — the full book value — for the asset, with the difference being made up by taxpayers via consolidated revenue.
Working out the details of the deal was not easy and it required piecing together disparate information from multiple sources.
Particularly helpful was a raft of documents obtained by Labor’s Margaret Quirk under Freedom of Information from Tourism WA, but also financial reports produced by DFES and Treasury, plus some testimony from DFES bureaucrats at a parliamentary estimates hearing late last year.
It really shouldn’t be this hard, but a Government that claims to be open and transparent has thrown up the cloak of commercial confidentiality as an excuse to not reveal the details.
It’s hard to see why. The sale price would have been known once the land settles in 2017-18 on the hotel’s completion.
And the Government says that Tourism WA won’t be doing another deal of this type under an incentive scheme aimed at boosting Perth’s supply of hotel rooms.
Valuations by respected private firms Colliers and Jones Lang LaSalle, as well as the Valuer General, put the unencumbered value of the site at between $19 million and $26 million.
That the Government sold it to BGC for $8 million is not improper, nor does it show that the builder (and historic Liberal Party donor) BGC got a “discount”.
Hotels are not as profitable as office buildings so BGC, in a competitive process, put in the bid the Government thought best.
While it might be a bit unusual for a Liberal Government not to just trust the market in these things, there’s nothing wrong with pursuing a policy objective (a new hotel) with a subsidy.
But transparency demands that you tell taxpayers what the subsidy is.
