WA Premier Colin Barnett should relinquish the important State Development portfolio, following a series of costly slip-ups.
AMWU State Secretary Steve McCartney called on the Premier to quit the portfolio in the State’s interest.
Mr McCartney said Mr Barnett was clearly having trouble balancing the dual roles of Premier and Minister for State Development and key WA industries were suffering.
“Six months ago, Colin Barnett admitted he ‘dropped the ball’ in not securing opportunities for local engineers and fabricators to participate in Gorgon and other major resources projects,” Mr McCartney said.
“Last week, Mr Barnett let slip that nothing had changed. When asked by Opposition Leader Eric Ripper in Parliament what engineering and fabrication work would be performed locally for Chevron’s new Wheatstone project, the Premier answered, ‘as if I would know the answer to that.’
“When Opposition spokesperson Peter Tinley asked a similar question of the Premier this week in Parliament, Mr Barnett couldn’t answer the questions, instead telling Mr Tinley he should, ‘go down the road and ask Chevron yourself.’
“And, this week it has been revealed by the Auditor General that Mr Barnett’s own Department of State Development has failed to monitor whether major resources projects are giving ‘full, fair and reasonable’ opportunities to local engineers and fabricators to participate in their projects, as required by the State Agreement Acts that Mr Barnett has responsibility for.
“To top it off, it appears that Mr Barnett has been asleep at the wheel again, confessing in Parliament to have been ‘caught on the hop’ by the sale of Wesfarmers’ Collie coal mine to Chinese company, Yancoal Australia.”
Mr McCartney said Western Australia’s economic base was far bigger than when Mr Barnett was Resources Development Minister in the Court Government and the Premier’s oversights in monitoring the local content performance of major resources projects were particularly damaging.
He said the recently released Auditor General’s report had concluded that ‘DSD (Department of State Development) could, within its remit of ensuring proponents meeting their [local content] obligations, go further but has not done so’ and that DSD had not ‘asked companies to show that they had invited local bids for all reportable contracts’.
The Auditor General also concluded that ‘it is not clear that operators are meeting their [local content] obligations’.
Mr McCartney said WA clearly needed a full time Minister for State Development.
“Clearly Colin Barnett does not have the time to be both Premier and Minister for State Development. The fact that he has repeatedly confessed to having no idea about the levels of local engineering and fabrication content in Wheatstone and the ongoing failure of his department to properly police the local content provisions in more than 20 other projects shows that its time for the Premier to strip himself of relinquish the portfolio and to appoint a dedicated Minister for State Development.”