Page 5812 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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The Labor Party, when it came to government, confronted with a major decision to alter the structure of two of the largest assets of this Territory - Totalcare and ACTEW - stood back, took a long, hard look at the facts of the matter, and decided that there was merit in proceeding with corporatisation in relation to Totalcare. We have done that and it is now a company. We have looked at ACTEW and come up with a different approach. That is not an ideologically driven approach, Mr Deputy Speaker; it is an approach based on sound commonsense.
MR COLLAERY (5.32), by leave: Mr Deputy Speaker, I join with those who support the need for micro-economic reform in the Territory and in Australia at large in supporting the Bill. I do not want to get into any ideological debate between the Labor and Liberal parties. I support most of what the Liberal Party said, probably all of what they said, on the in-principle issues; but I want to focus this debate and again join the Liberal leader in questioning why this Government is not proceeding more expeditiously with the ACTEW corporatisation.
The fact is that the work was all done for the Government. It inherited from us, like it has inherited just about everything in this current session. As the Chief Minister well knows, at her July Premiers Conference she should have got the joint report on the government business enterprises review. From my notes of the Premiers Conference in November 1990, it was scheduled to be presented in July. That joint report was to move with the Commonwealth in its agreed initiatives in facilitating change in the structure and ownership of GBEs, of government business enterprises.
It was recognised at the October 1990 Premiers Conference in Brisbane that Mr Kaine attended that the GBEs control a significant proportion of the nation's activities and that there was very good reason for looking at corporatisation of a number of functions, particularly those that could be put onto a fully competitive basis and those that met the national performance monitorings of GBEs.
We have heard only recently how Telecom has paid a huge dividend to the Federal Government by way of paying its tax, its company tax, in effect, this year. There is a loss of tax equivalence in the streams of income that go to and from government bodies, statutory bodies, that are not on a competitive basis but are out there trading, and trading to some extent with an unfair advantage over private enterprise. It is not only unfair to private enterprise; sometimes it is not a competitive environment and the cost structures are not healthy.
Coming to the Bill before the house, it appears to me that the Government has had the opportunity, since Totalcare has been effectively established for some time, to provide to us members the statement of corporate intent in its fully worked form, as this Government sees it operating. We agreed under the principal Act last year, members will
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