GOLD CORPORATION — AUSTRAC AUDIT
558. Mr R.S. LOVE to the Minister for Mines and Petroleum:
I have a supplementary
question. Will Western Australian taxpayers be left to pick up potential
liability for this failure that could run into the hundreds of millions
of dollars due to the failures on the minister's and the Premier's
watch?
Mr W.J. JOHNSTON
replied:
I understand that these matters stretch back to 2014 when Hon
Colin Barnett was the relevant minister. I will just make a point: if the
member looks at the time of this government, it is a series of improvements in
performance. The first improvement in performance came when the Premier was the
minister because he got rid of the chair of the
board, who was getting in the way of improving the standards of performance of
the business. The next thing to happen
was that we unfortunately had the COVID pandemic. It is understandable that the
Premier was distracted with saving the lives of Western Australians.
After the election, the Premier asked me to take on responsibility on the basis
that we were worried about the information that was coming to government from
Gold Corporation. That is what I did. I have
worked with the new chair, Sam Walsh—an outstanding Western Australian;
if the member makes any criticism of Sam Walsh, I look forward to
hearing it. We have an official of the Department of Treasury on the board, and
we have since hired an outstanding leader in Jason Waters. Just in the car park
the other day I met the Auditor General, who
told me what a refreshing change it was to have such an outstanding leader as
Jason Waters running the business. As she put it, he is looking under
every rock and finding every cockroach.
Yes, I agree that the business was left to us in a difficult
state by the former government. It has taken us some time to get on top of all the issues. One of the
reasons for that is that despite the fact that the Auditor General's
report had not raised these issues with us until after we found out
through other sources. Again, something I pointed out to the member in Hansard
at the time, I asked my office to approach AUSTRAC about whether I could get a briefing
from AUSTRAC on the work that it was doing.
If I can find the letter, I am happy to table the correspondence from
the AUSTRAC regulator—if I cannot find it right this second, I will
table it at the end of question time—in which it said that they would
not provide a briefing to me on its work.
The idea that somehow this is a failing of this government is
simply wrong. The first time that these matters were properly dealt with is
because of this government in the Premier's work of getting rid of the
former chairman and in my work in taking his leadership and applying the blowtorch
to the Gold Corporation. The fact is that we now know the problems. For
example, its failure to register in the United States under the particular
legislation it deals with there only came to
light because of the Jason Waters' work. The idea that somehow we have
lacked diligence is stupid; it is a ridiculous
suggestion. I cannot believe that members opposite sat in government and did
nothing about these things. I cannot
believe that the only way these matters came to light is because of
self-reporting by Gold Corp.
The SPEAKER: Members, that concludes question time.