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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 11 Hansard (14 December) . . Page.. 3028 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

The view put forward by the public servants who appeared before the committee was that the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal would be only too happy to hand over this task to another body. There was no substantiation of that view, however. It may well be that such substantiation has occurred since; but I draw it to the Assembly's attention that there is that unanswered question that was brought forward by a committee of this Assembly, and it ought to have been considered seriously by the Government.

Mr Speaker, the Government has said that the cost of this ACT tribunal will be in the order of $60,000 per year. There has been no examination of whether the services from what appears to be a single member and consultants could be achieved at a lower cost by either the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal continuing to do the job, or some other wage fixing tribunal doing it. What we are talking about here is a wage fixing tribunal. There are a number of bodies who might have been able to perform the task if the Government did not want the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal to continue doing it.

The Government has also said that it is only appropriate that the ACT have its own body; yet, in many other cases, the ACT does make use of non-ACT bodies to perform tasks for us where it would clearly be the case that there could be duplication. We continue to use, for instance, the Commonwealth Native Title Tribunal. The decision was taken not to duplicate native title tribunals for a task which was thought to be probably fairly scarce. It was considered not cost effective to set up our own tribunal. I think the Remuneration Tribunal's tasks are also pretty few and far between, and the same arguments could apply.

The ACT continues to use the Australian Valuation Office - a Commonwealth body, an independent body. We use that as the basis for our rate setting in the ACT, and I do not know of any proposal to establish our own valuation office. We use the Commonwealth Ombudsman, albeit under our own legislation; but we have not established our own Ombudsman and, Mr Speaker, I do not think there is any proposal that we would. We use the Commonwealth Administrative Appeals Tribunal as well. Again, there has been no proposal for us to establish our own Administrative Appeals Tribunal. We have arrangements with the Commonwealth for the use of Commonwealth bodies on purely ACT matters - for instance, the Commonwealth Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. We use their services, by arrangement, and I think that has worked out pretty well.

The Government is putting up a false argument when it says that we need to have our own organisation in order to establish an ACT culture which better reflects our own community. That is simply not the case in relation to any of those other functions or those other bodies. Indeed, I think Mr De Domenico has told Mr Osborne that he is considering using the New South Wales pricing tribunal for ACTEW. Again, it seems to me that that pretty much demolishes the Government's arguments about the need for a separate ACT body here. Obviously, Mr Speaker, the ACT makes use of other organisations where there are both financial and convenience reasons for doing so, and those bodies exercise their responsibilities in an independent way and in a way which is perceived to be independent. In some cases, the use of such bodies ensures community confidence in the level of expertise that is being applied, and I think that is a very important consideration.

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