Page 5805 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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opinion on this matter? I think that they have their head in the sand. Somehow they think that there is something to be gained by turning this operation into a corporation and putting it on a competitive basis, but they do not see the extension of those same benefits to other government activities. Of course, the biggest and the major one of those is ACTEW. The third operation that we were contemplating corporatising, close behind, is the ACT forestry operations. I would be interested to see whether the Government believes at some future time that the forestry operation ought to be corporatised because in principle it is no different from this particular operation.
So, it is a strange thing, Mr Deputy Speaker, that this Government, which in principle is opposed to corporatising, so it says, is happy to corporatise just this operation. I would be interested in their arguments, if they have any, that say that it is okay to corporatise this one, because there are benefits to be gained from it, but other government activities are not okay for corporatisation when the same benefits flow.
The Liberal Party supports this Bill because we believe in the concept of putting government owned operations onto a commercial basis and making them perform in a state of competition. We believe that this body, by being put into a state of competition with other similar operations out there in the private sector, will eventually get itself off the public purse. It will not need to be funded from Consolidated Revenue because it can become a functioning, competitive business operation in its own right. The management can get out there and sell its services and use up that excess capacity that was provided, I remind you, by Labor governments, an excess capacity that the local hospital system could never hope to utilise fully and which would always have been a drain on the public purse. By turning it into a corporate body and commercialising it, it will get out there; it will sell that excess resource capacity and will become a profit-making enterprise for the ACT.
I believe that that same argument applies to any other government operation which is commercial in nature. The same arguments apply. I will be waiting with great interest to see the Government coming along soon and saying that we will do the same with ACTEW, that we will do the same with the forestry operations, and that we will look across the whole range of activities conducted by the ACT Government Service to find other operations where there is benefit to this community by turning them into a commercial operation. I do not see how the Government can speak with a forked tongue on this matter. I will be waiting for their further initiatives.
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