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16 November 1993 and the second one dated 21 March 1995. This is just part of a lot of communication, telephone calls, and all sorts of meetings between us and the then Fahey Government supporting Speedrail; attempting to get the New South Wales Government to move, to start supporting the Speedrail approach, and to accept that Speedrail should have been looked at. That, certainly from my perspective, is not a negative approach.

Mr De Domenico: And Bob Carr should be congratulated for doing so.

MRS CARNELL: Absolutely. We are very happy with Bob Carr's approach. That shows that Ms Follett was wrong. She assumed that anybody in opposition was necessarily going to oppose. I would like to tell Ms Follett that we did not actually oppose everything. In fact, we did not oppose most things. It is interesting to note that the previous Chief Minister simply cannot accept that an opposition, as we were at the time, could have possibly supported something; but the letters are there for everyone to look at. There were also a number of interviews that Mr De Domenico and I did, urging the New South Wales Government to take a more positive approach to Speedrail. We are pleased that that has happened now.

It was also interesting to note the comments that Mr Berry made, particularly, and Ms Follett as well, about the economic approach of the previous Government and our economic approach. One of the things we have to understand is that the situation we were left with was not much chop, to put it mildly. These are not our figures; they are figures to the end of December, so we cannot end up with any misunderstanding on this. The local economy in the ACT, to the end of December, grew by 2.5 per cent in real terms. What happened nationally? There was growth of 4.7 per cent. We grew at just over half the rate of the national economy. That really is not up to much.

Interestingly, according to Mr Berry, we should be concentrating on jobs. The ACT labour market showed signs of weakening during all recent quarters, and we are talking about to the end of December. The ACT’s total employment, in trend terms, has been falling since October 1994, Mr Berry. That is not a really good success rate for you guys. We have a situation where total employment has been falling ever since October 1994, and it simply has to be turned around. The number of dwellings approved, in trend terms, has steadily declined over the last 12 months, indicating a real downturn in a market that is very important to us, the housing market. We already have a situation where employment is on the downturn. We have problems in a number of our key industries, and our growth rate is just over half the national average. That is the basis upon which we have had to start. We believe that the only way to go, as Mr Moore says, is to adopt a different approach.

Mr Berry made comments about corporatisation. It is interesting to note the two situations in the ACT where corporatisation has occurred. One is Totalcare and the other is ACTTAB. What happened with Totalcare? Totalcare was corporatised and what was a big loss to the ACT was turned around. We now have a corporatised entity, totally owned by the people of the ACT, that is starting to look like it is going to return a dividend to the people of Canberra, rather than cost us money, which was what was happening before corporatisation. With ACTTAB, the previous Government moved to

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