Page 3531 - Week 11 - Thursday, 14 October 1993
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Madam Speaker, the Government's objections to corporatisation are nothing more than codswallop, proven by the success of the Totalcare operation, which has been corporatised. Totalcare is now aggressively selling and marketing its services to New South Wales, with mixed success and great potential business sales to be achieved. This is not visionary; it is not new. No-one needs to reinvent the wheel. Totalcare is proof that changes to limited corporatisation work well in the ACT and can be very successful.
We all know, Madam Speaker, that the shareholders of Totalcare are the Chief Minister, Ms Follett, and the Minister for Urban Services, Mr Connolly. These shareholders hold the only voting rights protecting the interests of the owners of the company, the Territory's people. It is a mystery, therefore, and a contradiction in fact, given that success of Totalcare as a Territory owned corporation, why the Government has just changed ACTTAB, once a Territory owned corporation, back to a statutory authority. The success of Totalcare puts paid to all and any of the Government's weak arguments used to support what was only a cynical political move in regard to the treatment of ACTTAB.
I must congratulate Mr Connolly and Ms Follett, the two shareholders of Totalcare, on the wonderful way in which they have directed Totalcare, with the help of the board, ably led by Mr Denis Page from Ernst and Young. One wonders, therefore, that perhaps the only reason why Totalcare continues to remain a Territory owned corporation and ACTTAB has gone back into the fold is that, whereas Ms Follett is aided by Mr Connolly in Totalcare, she is joined as an ACTTAB board member by Mr Berry. I dare say that perhaps the reason is that Totalcare is in such able hands, whereas perhaps ACTTAB was not - but I am sure that it was, in fact. The success of Totalcare puts paid to arguments why governments should not look into corporatisation. Corporatisation can and does work, and Totalcare is testimony to that.
MR CONNOLLY (Attorney-General, Minister for Housing and Community Services and Minister for Urban Services) (5.14), in reply: Madam Speaker, Totalcare is indeed doing extremely well, as was indicated in the tabling of the statement of corporate intent. Employment levels have in fact gone up by some 15 staff since corporatisation. The Government had a statement of policy which was formulated through a Labor Party policy committee on the corporatisation of government business enterprises. The basic philosophy that came out of that - which was endorsed, I think uniformly, throughout our party - was that where you had an organisation that was competing with the private sector in a business sense it was acceptable and indeed sensible to corporatise it; that where you had a natural monopoly it was not sensible to corporatise it. Thus we were happy to proceed with the corporatisation of Totalcare, which has in fact since picked up business from competing private sector organisations. We stopped the corporatisation of ACTEW and, indeed, we brought back the corporatisation of ACTTAB.
It is interesting that Mr De Domenico says that Totalcare is doing well because it is corporatised and that therefore, if you corporatised other organisations, they would also do well. There is a report that I will be happy to refer to in some more detail next week. In fact, someone may care to ask me a question about it. It relates to the performance of water authorities over the last couple of years. It shows that there are two water authorities that have had an outstanding reduction in costs per customer over the past few years. One of those is the Hunter Water Board. The Hunter Water Board is much lauded - - -
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