This week has seen yet again another very critical report from the Auditor-General's office on the Land Development Agency's activities, this time over rural land purchases. All happening, no doubt by coincidence, just as ACT Legislative Assembly committee hearings are trying to look at another critical audit report involving other-than-transparent dealings between the Labor government and its chief sponsor, the CFMEU, over a land swap in Dickson, which, according to Auditor-General Maxine Cooper, had ACT taxpayers out of pocket value-wise (and the union's tradies club in profit) by about $3 million.

And that's without the dust having yet settled on an array of LDA deals around Civic that again saw developers seeming to profit mightily from the secretive and poorly documented way in which the government does business with developers, and deals with adjuncts to the land-development industry, not least land valuers. Yet again, our smarties were outsmarted by their smarties, with the public purse losing millions of dollars. And yet again, no one has been really called to account.

In normal circumstances, a battle-scarred Barr might well be able to insist that there ought to be no continuing public interest in further disinterral of the bodies. He had, after all, responded to all these criticisms more than two years ago, including by breaking up the LDA into two agencies: one to develop land in the suburbs and the other to ruin the peace around the lake. And he had to endure an election, at which he was returned, despite loud criticism of his style and his visions, and despite suggestions that the governance of the city had become corrupted, infected by cronyism and deals lacking transparency, and, in many cases, adequate documentation. Surely the result showed that the masses rejected the slurs.

Two years on, it has fallen to one of the LDA's successors, the Suburban Land Agency, to search for documentation and explanations of the processes involved with some of the deals, involving the acquisition of rural land on Canberra's western side. The agency's board and senior members might be on their own, having to defend their conduct, if with government resources. But it was not strictly necessary for the successor to defend the processes, or to insist that there was not even the appearance of anything having gone wrong, or the potential for things to go badly wrong.

But the eyebrows go up in reading the audit report, not only for some of the amateurish administration and decision-making processes revealed, but for the apparent failure of even the successor agency to see, even now, that there was anything much to complain about. And not only from the successor agency, but also from the government's legal advisers, pedantically arguing for a slacker interpretation of a government directive than the public interest, common sense and even the Commonwealth's solicitors' suggested. These are, it is clear, lawyers for the government, not the public interest.

The documentation, such as it was, did not suggest that ACT ministers were involved closely in the detail of many of the transactions under scrutiny. The failings, if they were failings, were at the hands of businessmen and experts, mostly from the private sector, charged with administering ACT land in the public interest and in a businesslike way. Their decisions were implemented through the hands of bureaucrats coming from an government tradition of claiming to know better than anyone else – certainly better than planners – how to administer land supply, manage land prices and, by this government's priorities, maximise profits by getting rid of as much of it as possible without much regard for the interests of future generations, or even of the present younger one, assuming that they want cheap land.

One thing for sure is that successive ACT governments have never wanted to concern constituents already owning land and houses by providing enough land to satisfy demand. That might cause land prices to fall and houses to become more affordable for those presently frozen out of the market.

And senior bureaucrats in the Chief Minister, Treasury the Economic Development Directorate are also often involved in crossing the i's and dotting the t's, if never seeming to do much that improves the trail or the documentary record. For everyone's sake – including, no doubt, for the purposes of deniability – a good deal of briefing seems to be strictly oral, with no documents around to prove troublesome in any audit, freedom of information request or legal process. And, perhaps, to shield the role of ministerial advisers, and perhaps ministers themselves, in decisions supposedly taken without being cleared in advance.

What one does not see is any evidence that powers that be within the administration are doing anything much to insist on a higher quality of process, documentation, record-keeping and accountability – indeed even of minimal compliance with the proclaimed standards required by ACT law. The administration is a generous subscriber to the Institute of Public Administration Australia, and, on that account alone, is able to host many functions at which it is proclaimed, or proclaims itself to be, at the cutting edge of efficiency, effectiveness, transparency, agility and innovation. That is what one would expect from a city state with perhaps the highest standard of living in the world; a city state, moreover, established (for federal purposes) around the notion of specialising in the arts of government . Alas, its denizens are very bad at governing themselves and, on most measures, our state-level administration, and leadership, are fairly second-rate, if quite expensive compared with nearly everywhere else. Some slight indications to the contrary – such as the level of personal health, or the high levels of educational attainment – owe rather more to being bourgeois than to the providers.

Most of the details of Cooper's report have been ably reported; for those who want more, I commend a reading. As ever, one can deduce that the standard way of doing business with government in Canberra is by personal dealings with decision-makers, from ministers down, at which one advances some ho-hum idea, then claims some sort of moral copyright over it, so as to get exclusive rights, or insider status, so that ordinary processes of proper government, such as fair dealings with all comers, with prices established in the actual marketplace by actual tender, do not happen. There's the usual array of people wearing different hats so that one does not know at any one time whether they are ministerial mate, public benefactor, urger on behalf of some client (disclosed or undisclosed), or simply a bloke out to make a quid, if needs be from complete suckers.

Yet again arise a host of questions about the role of land valuers in such small marketplaces. Canberra, apparently, has only a very few regarded as knowledgeable about commercial market prices by others in the big end of town. These, as ever, are one day acting for governments, the next day for private buyers and the next for private sellers. As avid businessmen, and as people of public spirit, they sometimes advise parties, including governments, of commercial opportunities out there and, sometimes, they act as agents for parties, sometimes several at once. They operate, of course, by strict codes of ethics, so that any idea of conflict of interest is unimaginable, except by people of malevolent bent – including, apparently, auditors-general.

The LDA, the ACT administration and the Barr government did not wake up one morning and decide to let themselves, and the taxpayer, be diddled by some smarties. It started with some prudence: the recognition that the supply of residential land was limited, and that it would be wise for government to secure for itself redevelopable rural land before shortages became a crisis. That the government had promised that some of the land in question would never be developed into suburbs while the LDA treated this as being merely under some medium-term moratorium is only a political problem, not one necessarily going to good stewardship.

But the ACT is not in the same position as some ambitious developer quietly buying up available land before other potential land speculators get wind of its cunning plans. And there are processes for determining land value – not least in circumstances where the land in question is zoned rural, and should not be sold as if the owner had the right, at some future time, to have it rezoned as residential.

One reason the Liberals must be restrained in their criticisms of the LDA deals is that they themselves were responsible for some irresponsible giveaways of public treasure less than 20 years ago. When the Commonwealth took the ACT from NSW in the early years of last century, it resumed all of the land, most of which was agricultural, and a good deal of which had been freehold. Land needed for the immediate city was retained, and ultimately leased by families or businesses, or reserved for government purposes; other land was leased back to pastoralists on the understanding that it could be, and would be, resumed, with fair compensation for any improvements, when it was wanted.

But the ACT Liberals have long wanted freehold or quasi-freehold in the ACT, and, less than 20 years ago, began giving 99-year leases to rural landholders (at least those on land for which there was no expectation of future city resumption). Per hectare prices were struck, based on the sheep-carrying potential of the land, typically for under $200 a hectare. Of course, many of those given leases wanted hobby-farm estates rather more than viable agricultural enterprises, and, as ever, those with restricted leases began to imagine that, if the land were ever resumed or rezoned as residential, they would deserve at least a share of the extra value. Land prices began to reflect some of this speculative value, on the assumption that, for a valuer, "market value" represents the value, including speculative value, that people are prepared to pay. Thus, one property leased for 99 years by the ACT government for $39,000 in 2001 was rebought 14 years later for $3 million; another for $204,000 for $10 million.

Barr has pointed out that the LDA purchases, if and when they are turned into suburbs, will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but his (or our) profit might have been all the greater had the Liberals not so foolishly sold public land at cheap prices to their constituencies. But it would also have been cheaper had the Barr government used land resumption rather than the farce of seeking pseudo-market valuations. Perhaps the most appalling reflection on the LDA, and its successor, is that, on one occasion, it actually asked the valuer to take account of the speculative, as opposed to market, value of the land.

It cannot be suggested that Cooper's investigations, thorough as they have been (given the mysterious absence of paperwork, memory and adherence to process), resolve the question of potential impropriety, negligence, corrupted and broken processes, or even actual fraud on the taxpayer. Her remit is value for money, and we know we didn't get that. But she has only a limited power over probity, other than to report to others evidence of its absence, and of the risks which that absence could cause.

Roll on, a Canberra ICAC. I reckon its members could grow old simply delving into land and planning transaction of the past decade.

Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com