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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 480 ..

MR MOORE: The Government said, "We can distance ourselves from that and still have a discussion about what is in it". Mr Humphries again interjects that there was nothing commercial-in-confidence about that. I can hear, had we been aware of it at the time, an echo of exactly the same argument when they were discussing it with CRA: "We cannot tell the Assembly members about this $11m we are going to waive because this is a commercial-in-confidence situation. If we allow CRA $11m off, before we know it we will have BHP wanting to come here and have $15m off. Then we will have Bond Corporation and Laurie Connell coming in and saying that they want their cut". Fortunately, taxpayers have been saved significant money by Mr Connell's recent action, and I use that example deliberately.

The specific issue will always be that governments will cry commercial-in-confidence. That is a standard thing. They will even write on it "commercial-in-confidence". They will write on it "Cabinet-in-confidence". I have made it very clear in this Assembly for the last seven years that I do not believe in either of those. I have made compromises all the way along because I know that the majority of members do believe in those things, so I think it is appropriate to compromise. The compromise in putting this amendment, and I will explain carefully what I mean by this amendment, is to allow the Chief Minister to take out of it what she considers commercial-in-confidence and to make that available to Assembly members - it may well be that some pages actually have a blank spot in the middle in the initial instance; I can see that - provided that the ones with the missing pages or occasional blanks on pages are tabled and the members are provided with a copy of the full document. I must say that the Chief Minister did offer yesterday to provide us individually with a copy of the full document.

That having been done, we can determine whether or not we think the commercial-in-confidence issue is strong enough for the rest of the document not to be tabled and effectively made public. If that is the case, it will remain where it is. If we believe that it ought to be tabled, maybe this afternoon or maybe at the next sitting of the Assembly we will come back and demand that that be tabled as well. For the moment, the amendment to this motion is a compromise, and I think it is a sensible compromise to give us enough time to look at it and to talk about it.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (12.28): In speaking to Mr Moore's amendment, may I make the point again, particularly to those opposite who have been in government, that this is a Cabinet document. The only place it has gone is to Cabinet.

Mr Moore: Hold it up and show us where it says "Cabinet-in-confidence".

MRS CARNELL: This is not the one that went to Cabinet, though. What it does say is "Commercial-in-confidence" all over it. The document was requested by Cabinet to make a decision. It was used for that purpose. It is an in-confidence document. Again, it has been part of a deliberative process. If this Assembly wants to take this approach, as Mr Kaine rightly said, then so be it. It just means that we should think about it very seriously. This document has tables in it which give the sort of information that would dramatically undermine our capacity, say, to sell the computers that are currently on our books, because it actually gives a depreciated value - not just the book value, which is the one on which we would hope people would tender, but a depreciated value as well.

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