Time to watch the watchers

STRAIGHT shooting backbencher Scott McConnell has a compelling point that the Gunner Government should open its books for a sweeping audit

STRAIGHT shooting backbencher Scott McConnell has a compelling point that the Gunner Government should open its books for a sweeping audit.

By last count, Mr Gunner and his ministers have called for well over three dozen reviews, inquiries, or studies since coming to government.

For years, Aboriginal organisations have questioned why the Territory Government gets billions from Canberra every year, yet many remote communities can’t get the services they need.

Those organisations have legitimately asked how much money is being unnecessarily soaked up by the Territory’s huge, mostly Darwin-based bureaucracy (wage bill: $2.5 billion a year) and whether money meant to be spent on disadvantaged communities is instead being siphoned off to projects in Darwin.

How is it, for example, that so many governments have spent billions on public housing in remote communities, yet so many are still living in squalid conditions, 20-to-a-house?

Is it right to spend tens-of-millions on underground carparks, museums and boulevards to nowhere in Darwin given the problems facing the Territory?

How is it that our public service can be so bloated, and so well paid (average salary, $93,000, the highest in the country) yet frontline services are so often sub par? A wide-ranging audit would attempt to answer such questions, and may result in some inconvenient answers for government and its bureaucrats.

Mr Gunner was last month seething at the Council of Australian Governments meeting in Canberra when the issue reared its head.

It was a somewhat contradictory scene, considering he and his colleagues seem addicted not only to reviews, reports and inquiries, but to pledging they are open and transparent.