Page 4958 - Week 17 - Tuesday, 11 December 1990
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a first step towards privatisation. This, I believe, would be a very retrograde step - and, really, a step that would not recognise the important community function of many of the agencies that we are dealing with.
The privatisation philosophy has, of course, long been the Liberal agenda, and we have seen that operating in New South Wales. We have seen a similar agenda operating in the United Kingdom and, of course, in the United States of America. If this corporatisation package that we are considering today does represent the thin edge of the wedge towards privatisation, I take the opportunity at the moment to express grave concern about it.
A further point that I want to make about the Territory Owned Corporations Bill is that it does require that corporations and subsidiaries be 100 per cent government owned. Again, that is of concern to me in my consideration of whether this is in fact privatisation by another name - because what that means is that as a further step there could not be any partial privatisation; that you would in fact be looking at the whole box and dice. I think that that must be of concern to people who have a worry about the operation of privatisation. Of course, anybody who is aware of what has happened in New South Wales and the United Kingdom must have that concern.
As I say, we have no objection in principle to the structures proposed by the Territory Owned Corporations Bill to be set up for Territory owned corporations. But this does not mean that we would support every case where the Government plans to change authorities into corporations.
There are a couple of aspects of the Bill which I am also very concerned about, and the first of those is the continuation of community services that are currently provided by government business enterprises and which are now planned to be operated under the new legislation, the Territory Owned Corporations Bill. I am concerned that the Bill we have before us appears to leave it to the board of a Territory owned corporation to decide which services it will provide. If the government of the day - and it could be this Government or it could be a future government - disagrees with the board's assessment and wishes other services to be provided, then the government will be required to fund those directly.
That is obviously a great concern, and the concern is, of course, that this could mean a reduction in services or in fact a greater cost to the community for the provision of particular services. I would ask that the Government consider - and Mr Kaine might want to address this question - whether they are prepared to guarantee the funding of those community services once this Bill comes into operation.
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