Page 373 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 1991
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All members present should have enough knowledge of the Canberra marketplace to realise that its size makes it prone to a lack of real competition. This leads to a situation where a small handful of operators can arrange among themselves to set the so-called market price, and we have seen this happen with crane operators in Canberra. There is no invisible hand at work in the Canberra marketplace which will honestly set the price for the consumer. If you believe that there is, then you are living in a dream world. This is because we do not have the capacity for real competition between real competitors; we are simply too small for this to occur.
Mr Speaker, with the Government's announcement today, I have to ask what will happen to the trade waste system in Canberra, but I think we all know the answer to that one, do we not? The market share which the government trade waste operators now hold will be divided among the smaller handful of private operators now involved. But I can already anticipate the Government's response to this point - the only reason we are closing it down is that it does not have a big enough share of the market.
Mr Speaker, I am not going to accept that argument for one moment. To make my point, let us just look at the facts of the matter and the way the trade waste operation has been run recently. Firstly, let us look at the reasons given for the closure. There are too many bad debtors, and the service is not making enough money, or it is only running at cost. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that the problems associated with trade waste operation systems stem from the Government's own policy of deliberately running down the operation. That the operation is not running as efficiently as it could is not the result of some unfortunate and mysterious event. It is not working as efficiently as it could because the Government does not want it to.
Mr Speaker, in the past few months we have seen the unbelievable situation in which the workers themselves have been requested to drum up their own business. However, when they did this, it seemed that management did not follow through properly to lock in the contracts. Moreover, with the word being spread around that the trade waste operation had only a limited life, business just did not want to enter into short-term contracts, and you cannot really blame them.
Mr Speaker, I went out to speak to the men and they told me that many of them were able to get contracts and had gone round and done so. When a man was sent out to sign up the contracts - and this was told to me by the workers themselves, because they had lined up the contracts - the people told them later that the fellow had arrived and said, "You know, it is not much use you taking a contract with us. We are closing down anyway, and you can do it much cheaper through the others". It did not give any hope
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