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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1704 ..

MR DE DOMENICO (continuing):

and not be part of a fishing expedition. The Government supports the motion, subject to the amendment circulated in my name, which will allow the Public Accounts Committee to have an ongoing role in monitoring the implementation of competition reforms in the ACT. I now move:

Omit all words after "implement" and substitute "the spirit of recommendation 8 of the report of the Select Committee on Competition Policy Reform by referring the implementation of competition policy to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts for monitoring and advice.".

MS FOLLETT (4.08): The Opposition will be supporting the motion as moved by Ms Tucker. I have to say at the outset, Mr Speaker, that the Government has brought this motion upon itself by yet again treating with absolute contempt the unanimous report of a committee of this Assembly. I think the attitude that has developed in the Government towards the work of the members of this Assembly is absolutely disgraceful. Mr Speaker, in our work as a committee looking at the implementation of competition policy, the committee looked very widely and very hard at the implications of competition policy. We did so, Mr Speaker, in an almost total absence of any real information from the Government. The Government produced reams of documentation, and not one single item of real information was contained in it. The committee formed the view that, on the major issues to do with competition policy, the Government has done very little work indeed.

The major issues, as the committee saw them, were the community service obligations, the issue of outsourcing and contracting out and the issue of consultation. On no occasion throughout the committee's consideration, Mr Speaker, was the Government able to produce any coherent thought on any of those issues. The committee sought in vain to discuss it with, and even interrogate, the bureaucrats who came before us. I am quite certain that they were doing their work to the best of their ability; but they were doing it in the total absence of direction or policy from the Government, let alone of the realistic and exhaustive examination of the implications of those major issues for the services delivered to the Canberra community.

I believe that the Government's approach today, as exemplified by Mr De Domenico's glib and again contemptuous speech, indicates that the work has still not been done. Mr Speaker, if anybody wants a good illustration of how much work remains to be done, I would refer them to the transcript of the committee proceedings when ACTEW was examined on the issue of community service obligations. This was an absolute revelation. Not only did the ACTEW representatives, on their own admission, not know anything about community service obligations; but they did not believe that they were their responsibility either. They were looking to the Government for an explanation of the policy and the procedures for assessing community service obligations and how they might be implemented under competition policy. Again, when it came to outsourcing and contracting out, there was no coherent policy statement; there was no direction.

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