Auditor-General Maxine Cooper's decision to investigate the land swap between the ACT government and the construction union's Tradies Club is welcome.
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Until each of the Land Development Agency's unorthodox land deals is properly scrutinised, the cloud that has hung over the agency will remain.
The auditor has already reported into the Glebe Park and lakeside land deals, finding they lacked transparency, accountability and rigour.
Now, she is investigating the buy-up of farmland around the city's fringe, with questions asked about why farmers were allowed to convert the leases to 99 years so close to selling the land to the government for varying prices, and inconsistency in the treatment of the Corkhill brothers who were allowed to enter a lucrative joint venture to develop west Belconnen.
This week, she turned her mind to the Dickson deal with the Tradies, owned by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Forestry Union, which is a powerful player in ACT Labor. In 2012, the Tradies responded to a government call for tenders for someone to buy the carpark outside the Tradies club in the Dickson centre.
The Tradies says it submitted the top bid, then entered negotiations, agreeing to pay $3.18 million for the carpark, where it plans a major commercial development.
The negotiations also took in the Tradies' blocks further up Antill Street, on section 72, where the CFMEU has its headquarters and its Stockade gym, and also owned the former Downer Club site.
The Land Development Agency agreed to buy those two blocks, settling on two very different prices. It paid the Tradies $3.9 million for the block housing the CFMEU headquarters and gym, and $49,500 for the Downer club site.
Aspects of this deal that deserve scrutiny include the first-base question of why the government is doing such cosy commercial deals with an organisation so closely connected to the Labor Party in the first place. The closer the connection, the more careful treatment a deal demands.
The detail is also curious. The government settled very swiftly on the CFMEU block, settling the deal within four days, just before Christmas in 2014 and handing the Tradies a handsome $3.9 million, which it has had the benefit of since. Meanwhile, the union continues to use the headquarters rent free for three-and-a-half years, and to collect rent from the Stockade gym.
As for the Dickson carpark, more than three years later the Tradies has yet to pay for it - and will not pay until the land is handed over at a date that is yet to be determined. The rationale for the delay is that the government does not want to lose the space to carparking until the Coles building, with underground carparks, is complete - but work is yet to even begin.
Then there is the question of the valuations. One of the Tradies blocks, the former Downer Club site, was valued at $45,000, whereas the other block, within a stone's throw and smaller, was valued at $3.55 million.
Just as Dr Cooper's scrutiny of this land swap is welcome, so, too, is the inquiry launched by the ACT parliament's public accounts committee into the lakeside and Glebe Park purchases. It is to be hoped that inquiry is not gripped by timidity, confused by complexity or kowtowed by politics or bureaucracy, and purses its work to its conclusion.
