Page 1454 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 26 September 1989
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number of blockages per thousand population in 1987-88 was 6.1, that a target is 6.5 and that an eventual target is less than 6.5. If you compute that figure, it comes to a lot of leakages and blockages. It looks small, but why can that target not be zero or 1 or 2? Why 6.5? I just wonder whether ACTEW is sufficiently reaching for the best possibility rather than saying, "This is what we have done so far. Let us marginally reduce those problems". I think you will find the same in the water supply and electricity supply figures.
I turn, however, from the Minister's brief statement and from some worries about details in the corporate plan to take up some further larger worries about ACTEW itself. And I remind members again of ACTEW's assertion that "it is a customer oriented business enterprise". I refer specifically to evidence given to the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Select Committee on 24 August 1989 by Messrs Williams, Winnel and Kenworthy. I do not know those people very well, and of course they are only some witnesses before that committee; there are other witnesses perhaps who might match them, although I do not see that. Some of their responses are in answers to questions raised by the chairman, Mr Collaery, and other committee members, Mr Wood and Mr Duby.
I will not repeat the material in this evidence because it is available in the transcripts of the committee on page 164 and following, but I draw the attention of members to it. However, I would like to wonder whether ACTEW is adequately meeting its aims given some of the statements in those hearings.
I do not necessarily endorse the challenges made by Messrs Williams, Winnel and Kenworthy but they are very worrying indeed. What are they saying? I am not sure about the technical terms or the technical things that are going on, but I do think I understand what "trenching" is about. In the case of trenching and other road construction matters, they clearly make a case for contracting out of ACTEW itself to more efficient private operators. I am not trying here to make an ideological point at all. It is a cost-efficiency point. The same is said to be true, as Mr Stefaniak has already indicated, for maintenance and other electrical matters, all of which would be more efficiently done, more cheaply done, by private contractors. It would be a considerable gain to the public. I quote particularly from Mr Winnel. He may have been speaking in an exaggerated way - perhaps he was rather upset; I do not know - but I quote him as follows:
I mean ACTEA -
and here he is not referring to ACTEW but ACTEA; and
I am not going to try to correct his grammar -
are notoriously inefficient, fail to deliver on time in almost every instance and have an
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