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‘If in doubt, get out’ over conflict of interest

The former chair of the state’s planning commission has told a parliamentary inquiry that she advised Attorney-General Vickie Chapman that a $40 million Kangaroo Island port proposal “should be approved”, declaring she employed her own benchmark for assessing conflicts of interest: ‘If in doubt, get out’.

Nov 05, 2021, updated Nov 05, 2021
(Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily)

(Photo: Tony Lewis/InDaily)

The Labor-led committee is inquiring into whether Chapman had any conflicts of interest, misled parliament or breached the ministerial code in relation to her decision to veto the Kangaroo Island Plantation Timbers proposal to build the port on the island, where she lived as a child and still owns property.

Helen Dyer, the managing director of consultancy Holmes Dyer and former chair of the State Planning Commission, told the inquiry the commission “did recommend that the [KIPT] application should be approved”.

“I think that letter [to the minister] also expressed that the commission was very finely balanced in making that decision – it was quite a subjective decision,” she said.

“There was a lot of information, and we weighed it all up and we had a number of meetings to discuss the issues, and we came down on the side that it was okay to approve it.”

Dyer recalled a subsequent meeting with Chapman at which “the minister asked if I could just give her a little bit more explanation around the commission’s assessment report and how we came to our decision”.

“So I spoke to her about the contents of the letter that I had written to her… and just explained that it was a very considered decision,” she said.

“It was a very hard decision to arrive at one way or the other, that we’d probably flip-flopped in a sense in terms of where you weighted the particular issues, and I think it’s probably fair to say that the commission was persuaded by the fact that timber was on the island and it needed to be taken off the island to be capitalised.”

She said the proposal was “able to be supported by all of the agencies” although the commission was “somewhat concerned… about the stringency of the monitoring or reporting that would have been required, and potentially the impacts if something did go wrong”.

“But on balance we found that we could support it,” she said.

Dyer said Chapman had never indicated opposition to the port proposal, but “I think at the meeting that we had she was indicating concern regarding the difficulty of the decision”.

“I think from memory that she may have mentioned some concern around the [KI-based] Yumbah abalone operation, and that was a concern obviously to the commission as well,” she said.

Dyer said she was aware “generally” that Chapman “had come from the island [but] I didn’t know she had property on the island”.

Labor MP Tom Koutsantonis referred to a report that Dyer had recused herself from around 40 planning commission matters during her tenure citing conflicts of interest.

“I probably base it around the tests that are provided in the Local Government Act because that’s where my background is, so I would look to pecuniary interests for myself or direct linear family members,” Dyer said.

“I had regard to perception [but] that was a much harder one, I think, to work out the test.”

Koutsantonis asked: “So a private business interest would be a development that might impact your land?”

“Yes, I guess it would depend on the degree of impact,” Dyer responded.

“I abided the rule ‘if in doubt, get out’ so that was how I approached it.”

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