Page 3098 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 10 September 1991
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Territory at the present time on a commercial footing. Quite frankly, I see absolutely no reason why the Territory should so long have endured a Cemeteries Trust that was subsidised. What possible argument can there be for providing public subsidies for cemeteries? It would seem to me entirely appropriate for us to have done this some time ago and I only regret that the Alliance Government was too slow to have this legislation up itself well before now. Nonetheless, it is good that the legislation has come forward and I embrace it warmly.
I encourage the Government to consider adopting this course of action with a number of other public enterprises, which I will not name tonight but which I am quite certain the Ministers could easily consider and enumerate for themselves. I believe that this process, once begun, will make a substantial contribution towards easing the burden that the ACT will face in the coming years as it adjusts to non-Commonwealth levels of public subsidy.
MR COLLAERY (8.41): One point that interests me in relation to the legislation is that the Minister retains the general power to set fees and charges. Yet Mr Humphries sees the trust moving to a full commercial operation. I am not quite sure that that is the case. I think we are getting a hybrid out of this at the moment. I imagine that close attention needs to be paid to the actual structure of the trust because - - -
Mr Duby: If that was the case there would have been a 60 per cent increase in prices this year.
MR COLLAERY: Yes. As Mr Duby correctly says, the proposals for fees and charges that the Alliance Government was looking at, which were brought in largely unchanged by the Follett Government, indicated to me some quite surprising charges, particularly at Gungahlin. I clearly remember one sum of $450 or thereabouts to dig a grave of less than the usual depth for a child burial. That seemed to me an enormous amount of money, but I was assured by Mr Duby that the economics of operating out at Gungahlin were such as to require that level of cost recovery.
Mr Duby: We limited them to 10 per cent; they wanted to increase them by 30 or 40.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Duby has spoken already; so I will put into the record his interjection that the former Government limited them to 10 per cent, but they were talking, as he has said by way of interjection, of up to a 40 per cent increase. That suggests that maybe we should look at the whole operation of our cemeteries in the Territory.
I must say that the Queanbeyan lawn cemetery, on a hill overlooking the beautiful environment of Canberra and the hills, is much more a traditional cemetery site, in my view, than that which we have attained to date in the flatlands of the ACT. There are increased encroachments at
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