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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (16 April) . . Page.. 897 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

but also the potential ramifications of competition policy are largely unexplored and have been ill considered. People throughout government are quoting Hilmer, who, incidentally, always said that the competition principles should not be applied to service delivery; but Hilmer is being quoted and the principles are definitely being implemented. On one hand, we are told that competition principles are not to apply to the non-business aspects of government agencies and that areas like health and education are supposed to be sanctioned, but that does not appear to be the reality at all.

Many people saw this committee as the only opportunity to comment on not only competition policy but also this whole micro-economic reform agenda. The whole competition policy agenda is overseeing a major shift in the culture of the public sector. Some of it may be good, but the point is that government, unlike business, is not here only to function efficiently or on a commercial basis; it must meet much broader goals.

It was also of concern to see that there had not been any real modelling of negative economic costs of implementing these sorts of changes in delivery of services. The purchaser-provider model is always explained as something which will result in much greater efficiency; but, when you take into consideration questions like public interest and community service obligations, you realise that there is a lot of work to be taken on by government to make sure that this public interest is met. That means people; that means monitoring; that means processes; that means work. We have yet to see the costing for that.

The Government was not really sure what the extent of the application of the competition code to the ACT was. All the processes that are being set up to implement competition policy in the ACT appear to be internal, and that was of great concern to the committee. There was a lack of consultation processes for the future, and there has been little public input to date. The committee had access to a report that was prepared by the Western Australian Standing Committee on Uniform Legislation and Intergovernmental Agreements, and that committee had serious concerns about the lack of accountability.

We did have discussions about markets, as Mr Kaine said, and competition. While the market is a useful model for some purposes, it is certainly not the basic paradigm to solve all problems of delivery of service. Competition is a rather elusive concept, in fact. If you want to look at it, we can push it a bit further and say, "All right; we are looking at being competitive". Competitiveness in transport, for example, means talking about buses. Let us push it a bit further and say, "How do cars compete with buses?". We can take the discussion further than it has gone. Economic theories upon which competition policy reform is based do not value human and environmental capital. As a number of submissions pointed out, markets themselves fail and competition, far from being a cure-all, can actually have devastating consequences when imposed on many sectors of the community.

There have been very few questions asked and answered about the nature and appropriateness of the competition that is being endorsed by these reforms. I noticed this statement in John Quiggin's submission:

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