Page 3097 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
continuing with the Ngunnawal community to provide them with a very important element for their life within our community. It is not much to ask, I would have thought, for a people who moved over these plains well before our time. Two hundred years is like just a fraction of a second when compared to the more than 20,000 years for which they existed on these plains and surrounding hills.
MR HUMPHRIES (8.36): Mr Speaker, the Cemeteries (Amendment) Bill did catch my eye, if only because the basis on which this Bill is brought forward seems to differ somewhat from a policy adopted by this Government in other areas. The Bill, of course, is a fairly simple one. It simply provides that the operation of the Cemeteries Trust change from a fairly heavily regulated one, as it is presently, to a more commercial one. The trust is now required, under this legislation, to keep accounts in accordance with commercial practice, and that is, of course, the first step towards its becoming more commercially oriented.
I have to wonder why it is that the Cemeteries Trust should be considered for this kind of operation when the Territory has a number of other potentially commercial operations - operations providing services to the general public of the ACT - which have not been similarly treated by this Government. Of course, I am thinking in particular of the held up corporatisation of ACTEW and the Mitchell Health Services Supply Centre. Perhaps the Minister, when he makes his remarks in summing up, can enlighten us as to the reasons that the Cemeteries Trust is considered appropriate for immediate commercialisation, shall we say, and those other two organisations are not yet, apparently, at the stage where they can be exposed to the cold hard winds of commercial practice.
It seems to me that, if this Bill's object is to reduce the level of subsidisation of the trust's activities and the burden on the ACT taxpayer - the Cemeteries Trust presently absorbs only a relatively small amount of public money per annum - the argument for assuming the same course of action with respect to ACTEW and the Mitchell Supply Centre is even stronger. I have to say that I look forward to this Government embracing as soon as possible the same very worthy principles in respect of those other organisations. Indeed, it ought not to stop there; we ought to be looking as quickly as possible at those basic services provided by the Territory which could be provided just as well by an organisation operating on commercial principles.
I am not saying necessarily that the Government needs to privatise these organisations. It clearly has an objection to doing so - or at least some members of the Government have an objection to doing so. I suspect that others would not mind seeing more of it happen, but they obviously are not in the majority. But, even if we do not embark on wholesale privatisation, there is clearly a strong case for putting major operations conducted by government in the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .