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What does the community think? What do ACTEW employees think? What do the unions think? Many ACTEW employees rang us with a range of concerns, including the forecast rise in middle to senior management salaries and the direction the organisation will generally take. In the last few days we have sent out information to the community and we have asked them what they want. Some said that they could not speak for their organisation and they would not be able to make a decision until they had. Others said that, off the record, they supported an inquiry, but did not want to be political in the current climate. Who can blame them, after seeing what has happened to ACTCOSS? Virtually all of them said, “Thanks for providing us with the information. We did not know anything about it”.

A common concern amongst all the people we talked to, including many of the unions, was the social welfare aspects of corporatisation. Social welfare is not something that is high on this Government's priorities list. Recently, the Assistant Treasurer of the Commonwealth has instituted an inquiry to look at the effects of the competitive reforms on social welfare and the severe financial hardship many low income earners are facing as a result of those reforms. One aspect of social welfare that ACTEW can help with, and does, to a limited extent, is energy efficiency in public housing. All over Canberra there are thousands of public housing tenants living in homes that are not at all energy efficient. Regardless of the rebate ACTEW provides them with, it is a struggle, and often an impossibility, to keep warm and to eat and to clothe the family during the winter months.

Here is an opportunity to have a win for the environment, a win for local business and employment, and a win for low-income households. It costs the taxpayer an inordinate amount of money, both in rebates and in unnecessary expenditure on burning coal that we do not need. What will ACTEW’s responsibilities be after corporatisation to work on this problem? We simply do not know. Is ACTEW doing enough now? Probably not. Let us take the time and get it right. In Victoria charities are beginning to have to fork out big money to pay for the social welfare that the privatised utilities no longer want to pay for. Let us make sure that it does not happen here. Let us give the legislation more thought and more input. Let us let the Salvation Army, the Smith Family, the Tuggeranong Community Council and other people have a say about the structure that they want for one of the most significant assets that this town has.

I want to look briefly at the environmental side of ACTEW. In the ACT we are nowhere near meeting our greenhouse gas targets. We consume vast quantities of energy and take it all for granted. In the backyards of the Hunter Valley, young and old suffer, and have done so now for a very long time, because of the pollution created there by the coal that they burn to give us power. To some extent, that is a sad fact of life; but Australia is the world's leader in renewable energy technology. We have a climate that is amenable to solar technology and a vast quantity of open space, yet we are not utilising this knowledge and this geographical advantage to become world leaders in supply. In the ACT nearly all the energy we consume at home or at work is used in heating or cooling or providing hot water. There is an enormous business opportunity here. It is little wonder that organisations like Solahart have supported our call for an inquiry.

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