ALBANY
WAVE ENERGY PROJECT — CARNEGIE CLEAN ENERGY —TENDER PROCESS
166. Hon PETER COLLIER to the Minister for Regional Development:
My question relates to the minister's
decision to terminate the Carnegie contract. I refer to the minister's
response to Legislative Assembly question on notice 4826, in which she stated
that of the five submissions, four proponents had met the tender requirements
for the wave power contract, and her response to question without notice 145,
which I asked yesterday, in which she said that the reason that none of the
remaining three companies that met the requirements would now be offered the
opportunity to take over the contract was that ''the quality of the
applications of the other tenderers was not up to the standard of Carnegie.''
Given that three companies met the
required tender guidelines, why were these guidelines ignored when the minister
made the decision not to proceed with the project and based her decision purely
on a comparison with Carnegie?
Hon
ALANNAH MacTIERNAN replied:
I thank the member for the question.
It is one thing to satisfy the technical requirements of a tender; it is
another to make an assessment that this is a model that would be viable. That
was the advice that we got from the department both at the stage when the
department advised that the recommendation was that Carnegie was the best
application and subsequently when we were looking at what strategies might be
available to us. The assessment of those officers involved in assessing the
tender was that they did not believe that the other applications were strong
enough. But, as I say, there is a big difference between satisfying the
technical requirements and meeting the standards that government might want to
enter into a partnership.