Page 3387 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 17 September 1991
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It did not get any better with Mr Stefaniak's speech, which again adopted the magic pudding approach that if you corporatise a body you can extract vast sums of money from it. He said that if we corporatised ACTEW there would be another $12m, whereas our taking of another $7m from ACTEW is dreadful and improper and the end of civilisation as we know it.
I was reminded, on hearing that during the early stage of the debate on corporatisation, that $12m seemed to be springing up from every corporate entity. We had statements from, respectively, Mr Humphries and Mr Stefaniak, talking about $12m to be found through corporatising ACTEW and through corporatising Mitchell, and I was just waiting for a statement from the Liberal Opposition that we would make $12m if we corporatised Natex. It seemed that $12m was the standard profit to be made from corporatising every entity. It is the ultimate magic pudding approach to budgeting; you just run around turning authorities into corporations and $12m springs up from nowhere.
Mr Moore then foreshadowed his amendments. He takes a similar grave exception to vesting this power in the authority, and he would prefer that the Assembly - - -
Mr Duby: And the Minister.
MR CONNOLLY: And the Minister. Either, indeed. I was going to come to Mr Duby's speech because it brought a breath of fresh air and sanity to the debate to that date. There is a major and fundamental problem with the proposal that Mr Moore has put, as it stands, and that is that the amendment which will set the basic water allowance at 350 kilolitres will come into effect when that amendment is passed by this Assembly, and the result will be that the basic allowance will be 350 kilolitres from the date the amendment becomes law. The Government has clearly announced that we propose to phase in the reduction in the water allowance. It may well have been the former Government's intention - - -
Mr Duby: No; you are just being wimps.
MR CONNOLLY: We are being wimps, Mr Duby says. We do not think phasing in a major change is being wimpish; we think it is being extremely sensible. We want to phase it in because we do not see this to be a revenue measure. We believe that if this reduction is phased in people will take sensible precautions to reduce the water consumption, much along the lines of the precautions that Mr Jensen outlined. Mr Jensen ran through a range of activities that households or organisations can take - simple measures like installing drip irrigation systems that dramatically reduce water consumption.
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