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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (16 April) . . Page.. 893 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

One of the other major recommendations that the committee made was that the Government should establish a forum to provide ongoing monitoring and advice on the implementation of competition policy and that such a forum should include representatives of the community and environmental, consumer, union, business and academic organisations.

In looking at this competition policy, I think the committee was concerned overall about a lack of coherent policy, a lack of direction, a lack of study of the full impact of competition policy. We wish to ensure that the community does have an appropriate opportunity to make that assessment and to advise the Government on what their assessment is. The forum that we have recommended has not been specified any more closely than I have just informed you. It is up to the Government to decide what shape and size that forum might take. There are a number of options; for example, the Chief Minister may wish to convene a forum from the existing consultative councils that the Government has - the Women's Consultative Council, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Consultative Council, the Youth Advisory Council and so on. That is one way of looking at it. It may be that an Assembly committee would be the Government's preferred course of action. There may be some entirely different approach. (Extension of time granted) I thank members. I do commend to the Government, in particular, that recommendation. I believe that, if the community is to get the benefits of competition and is not to be disadvantaged in the way that many submissions have feared, that forum, the open consultative process, would be very much to everybody's advantage.

In closing, I would like to thank my fellow members of the committee - Mr Kaine and Ms Tucker - for their work. It has been a very challenging inquiry for us, and it has involved our doing a fair amount of work in a quite short space of time. I found it a very interesting and very enjoyable inquiry. I would also like to thank the committee's secretariat - Mr Russell Keith, who did the later work on our inquiry, and Ms Beth Irvin, who started us off on our course of inquiry. I think both Ms Irvin and Mr Keith did a superb job for the committee. Members may not know, but Mr Keith will be leaving the Assembly fairly soon. He has been appointed to a position with the New South Wales Parliament. His work on this committee has been exceptional, and I would like to put that on the public record.

I would also like to thank all of the organisations and individuals who put submissions forward to the committee. I think it is fair to say that the submissions were extremely thoughtful, extremely carefully crafted and of an extremely high level of thoroughness. It made for some very difficult work for individual committee members, because we had a great deal of reading, assessment and analysis to do. But I believe that the nature of those submissions indicates the depth of debate that ought to be taking place on competition policy. If we are to get the best out of it, and I think our community should and must get the best out of competition policy, then we must look at all of the issues that have been raised by representatives from the community and from organisations which are interested in the topic. I commend the report to the Assembly.

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