Page 3038 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 14 September 1993
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If ACT Forests must supply a user of end logs with a certain quantity and type of logs it may, on a number of occasions, be appropriate for ACT Forests to buy in logs from New South Wales rather than have to cut logs at earlier than their optimum time. So over the passage of the years there has been an ongoing process of operation across State borders.
The old trust account was established by the Commonwealth at some time in the 1950s - no-one can quite find out when. As is, I suspect, the case in a number of situations established in relation to ACT administration in the 1950s, it simply proved impossible to track down the paperwork and find the instruments that established the old trust account under which ACT Forests conducted its operations. Some questions were raised as to whether that document, if it could be found, clearly validated interstate trading operations. As a result of that, we took the decision that we had better set up a trust account under the Audit Act. It made sense to bring it under ACT administration, to make it clearer anyway, and it made sense to have an account that was operating clearly under the Audit Act; but principally it was to clear up possible doubts about State trading operations.
The reason for this legislation, as Mr Kaine indicated in his closing remarks, is that if we did not formally close the old account and move the money across by legislation the normal consequence of closing a trust account is that the money would go into Consolidated Revenue. The result of that would be that ACT Forests would generously donate to Consolidated Revenue their entire operating funds. They would then have to be reappropriated, which would give a quite misleading impression of ACT ratepayer contribution to forestry because in one year you would see an appropriation of the whole amount of the trust fund into ACT Forests. So what this Bill does is quite simply move the money across from the old trust account to the new trust account.
The reason for the new trust account, as stated in the speech, is simply to reflect up-to-date arrangements. There is a bit more to that which goes back to the fact that no-one could locate the documents which set up the old trust account, and that did give rise to certain questions as to whether that validated interstate operations. I suspect, Madam Speaker, that over the coming years we might find a few other occasions when, as a result of odd little things that were created under Commonwealth administration, and documents that have been lost or misplaced or otherwise disposed of, we have to do similar things.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Bill agreed to in principle.
Leave granted to dispense with the detail stage.
Bill agreed to.
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