Page 825 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 16 June 1992
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MR CONNOLLY: Mr De Domenico interjects about Mother Russia. It almost brings you back to the schoolyard Marxists of 20 or 30 years ago, who had a similar touching faith that public enterprise was the answer, the panacea for all problems. This lot have simply reversed it 180 degrees: Corporatisation, privatisation, solves all your problems; micro-economic reform simply means corporatisation; you wave the wand, you change the name and change the structure, and everything magically sorts itself out. Of course, it does not work like that. You achieve benefits, you achieve efficiencies in micro-economic reform, by sheer hard graft. It is hard work. It is the daily grind of getting in there and achieving efficiencies, changing things, managing better, turning inefficient systems around to deliver efficiencies. This Government has been hard at work for 12 months doing that, and the runs are on the board.
Towards the end of Mr Westende's remarks he brought us back to the ACTION bus system. I would have thought that, after the first MPI the Liberals raised on ACTION buses, they would have been well advised to keep away from that, because they got done over comprehensively. Mr De Domenico looked at the 1990-91 annual report and said, "What a shocking indictment of ACTION! The subsidies are going up, the number of employees is going up, the number of buses is going down". He was very surprised when we said, "Yes, that is a shocking indictment. It is a shocking indictment of the failure to manage when you lot were in power, the failure to manage when Mr Kaine was the Chief Minister and said, 'Just leave it alone; do not interfere with it. Do not get in and achieve these hard reforms. Let the subsidy blow out by $7m', which it did in your period of administration".
We got into power, and we have turned that around. We have delivered $2m already this year, and there is another $1m to come. We will get ACTION down to a position where the operating subsidy is on a par with the operating subsidy of public transport elsewhere, and we will do that through reform, through consultation with the union movement and management to deliver better workplace practices. We are well on the way. That $3m will be in the bag by 6 July. We are achieving results, but not through rhetoric.
Corporatisation: What's in a name, Madam Speaker, because to some extent that is the issue here? ACTEW, the authority that bore the brunt of most of Mr Westende's savaging, as it were, operates on very businesslike lines. It operates under a board. In effect, the only difference, if it were to be corporatised, would be that we would set up a legal structure of a couple of shares. It is a purely symbolic change. It does not deliver any benefit to the public policy. Whether they are under the structure of a statutory authority, as they currently are, or under the structure of a company, which Mr Westende would have us believe would magically solve all the problems, does not matter a damn. What matters is whether management is doing its job and the board is doing its job to control costs and deliver efficiencies.
Let us look at the performance of the ACT Electricity and Water Authority, an authority which has been in existence for only some four years. It was brought about as an amalgamation of the old Electricity Authority and the old water and sewerage functions and set up under the statutory authority model, with a board and a chief executive reporting back, under self-government, to a Minister.
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