Page 5811 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Totalcare is a massive Territory asset, as Mr Humphries quite correctly noted. Its valuation of its assets for the purposes of the Australian Securities Commission puts the plant out there at a valuation of some $45m. So, it is a massive Territory asset. It can work efficiently, competing with the private sector, and there are some advantages of corporatisation.
ACTEW, on the other hand, is not competing with the private sector. It is a supplier of monopoly services. It enjoys a statutory monopoly for the provision of electricity and water in this Territory and the provision of sewerage services in this Territory. It is a totally different organisation from this body. There is no competitor. You cannot decide to have your electricity put on or your sewage taken away by either ACTEW or some competitor. It supplies an essential service. What it certainly needs to do is continue to increase its efficiency.
ACTEW in recent years has been undergoing quite a lot of reforms in the efficiency sense. It delivered this year a dividend to government of some $19m. It is an efficient organisation, the largest business in the Territory. ACTEW, if it were a company, would be one of Australia's 100 largest companies. It certainly is the largest ACT asset, and it is returning a good dividend. It is operating efficiently, but it is doing it without the corporate form. That is simply unnecessary. The corporate form would deliver no advantage to a body like ACTEW because of the nature of its operations. This organisation is different.
Mr Humphries: Talk about ideology coming in here.
MR CONNOLLY: Mr Humphries interjects about ideology. The difference, Mr Deputy Speaker, is that the Labor Party is looking at this on a case by case basis and is able to see a difference and accept that, whereas the corporate form may be appropriate in one case, it is not appropriate in the other. It is this ideological obsession that the Liberal Party have with corporatisation that blinds them to this.
I also note with some wry amusement that Mr Humphries was taunting us that we should have implemented the previous Government's decision; we should have gone straight ahead and rubber-stamped this decision to corporatise and that would have been a sensible approach. I remember that last week one of the few decisions that we could be accused of having just rubber-stamped was the package of revenue measures, the package of fees. That was one of the first decisions the incoming Labor Government took - to in effect rubber-stamp the decision of Mr Humphries and his colleagues. Of course, that was the one that you disallowed last week. So, when we do actually endorse one of your decisions, you turn around six months later and take the opposite view.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .