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of every case. Under our Government we allowed the corporatisation of a body like Totalcare to proceed because it was a trading body competing out there in a private sector environment. We allowed that to proceed, and it proceeded successfully. We said, for a body that was an electricity retailer, “We will not go ahead with corporatisation. We will focus on reform”. We said, for a body like ACTION, which is a public transport provider operating in a public sector environment, “We will not go ahead with corporatisation. We will go ahead with reform”. We looked at it on the merits. They have gone in saying, “Corporatisation is good; the private sector is good; the public sector is bad; a private sector model must inherently be better than a public sector model”. Certainly, it was the experience of the 1980s, was it not, that the private sector model was definitely the way to go about things? The 1980s, when the private sector was given its head and governments often followed, proved to be one of the greatest decades of greed, corruption and collapse that we have ever seen. This model, this ideology, that the corporate form is intrinsically better than the statutory authority form, is straight-out ideologically-driven politics. Then, Mr Humphries, your straw man comes back to haunt you, because the statements of your colleagues have displayed that blind ideological commitment - that it must be better to be in a corporate form than a statutory authority form. So, there is the first straw person knocked out.

The second straw person I want to address is that the Labor Government never did anything about reforming the ACT public sector enterprise; that it was a government that merely tinkered. Again, let us use the example of ACTION, which you are going to corporatise. When I had my first budget responsibility for ACTION, the subsidy was about $57m, and the projection was that the subsidy would be heading up well above $60m, to $70m-plus, if the status quo that we inherited from the Alliance Government was maintained. Historically, the largest subsidy that ACTION ever received was in the Alliance Government's budget. We embarked on a very dramatic process of reform of ACTION, and there was a whole lot of industrial action over that. There was quite a blue for a period. As a result, in last year's budget the ACTION subsidy was brought in at slightly under $40m - a saving in the order of $20m being achieved through very dramatic reform, and that is a saving off a base of $57m to $60m. So, we have achieved a 20 to 30 per cent saving in efficiencies of a public sector enterprise without tinkering with the corporate form.

Mr Whitecross will also be addressing this subject. We can look at what has happened over months and months. The experience overseas where you tinker with a corporate form is that you just increase your costs and reduce your level of service. What Labor did was not to be ideologically driven about corporate form. That is your position, not ours. We addressed the hard issues of reform of the public sector - the other issue that needs to be addressed. So, there is Mr Humphries rewriting history, in almost Orwellian proportions, to try to show that the Labor Government was something that was bad because it was driven by ideology and it failed to address the fundamental, underlying issues of ACT economic reform. In both areas, we did address those hard issues.

There is another issue that needs to be addressed. Mr Humphries said that all these wonderful things are going to happen about health. What is going to happen about health? That is the problem. Again we have the rewriting of history. We get a lecture that oppositions should not be carping and whingeing. Mr Speaker, if one wanted a textbook on carping and whingeing opposition tactics, the gold medal with bar would

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