Page 828 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 16 June 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Moore interjected, "What about the dividend? That is controllable". Yes, it is. Nineteen million dollars is paid by ACTEW by way of dividend. ACTEW has an asset base of $1.2 billion. The $19m dividend, paid this year and last year, represents a 1.6 per cent return on that asset base. We could have had a lower dividend. Every one of those nineteen million dollars, Mr Moore, goes to pay nurses and teachers and policemen and the general community services.
We would love to live in Mooreland, because in Mooreland you can provide infinite government services, you can provide endless resources to the community, and you can never increase taxes; you can reduce taxes and charges. Everyone lives happily ever after in Mooreland. But we do not, unfortunately, live in Mooreland. If Mr Moore wants us to reduce the ACTEW dividend, he has to show us, for every million dollars he cuts off that dividend, where he cuts a million dollars off government expenditure or where he produces another million dollars in revenue. We believe that that 1.6 per cent dividend is reasonable.
Mr Westende was prattling on about corporatisation or privatisation. The word "privatisation" tends to keep slipping in here, and I keep hearing glowing references to New Zealand, where they have privatised, of course. Madam Speaker, is there any private sector organisation in the country that would invest money on a 1.6 per cent return or dividend? If we were to privatise this organisation, which is the farthest extent of your rhetoric, who would invest at a 1.6 per cent return or dividend?
A notional return that most accountants or economists would see as acceptable would be about 5 per cent. A 5 per cent return on the ACTEW asset base would mean that we would need about a $65m dividend. We would need to get $46m additional. That would translate to about a 20 per cent increase in prices. That is what you would get if you ran this on what Mr Westende calls business lines. If you wanted to get ACTEW returning a realistic dividend, a dividend a private investor would expect, as you say the New Zealanders have done so cleverly, that is what you would be talking about.
I will not introduce the subject of the goods and services tax because that would only confuse matters. But your rhetoric about price increases ignores the fact that your leader up there on the hill wants to introduce a massive tax on all of this, at 15 per cent. I presume from that that what they are focusing their little anger on here is the environmental increase. The increases were very moderate. I have a chart - this is in colour and very simple so that even Liberals can understand it - and I table a photocopy of the relevant figures. What this shows is that our increased prices that you lot are prattling on about remain lower than capital city prices elsewhere.
The biggest increase - the area where you rant and rave about a 16 per cent increase - is in sewerage. What this Government did was to impose a $25 environment levy in relation to sewerage. That means that this document that you all have - the environmental audit of our sewage treatment plant and our 20-year plan for improving the quality of the environmental output - can be funded. What we are doing - we know that it is not popular; we do not expect people to be cheering at paying that $25 levy - is setting us up for the next 20 years, doing what New South Wales should have done 20 years ago and what every other State should have done.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .