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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1710 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

doing it which will ensure that those issues are protected. What this forum is intended to do is to assist the Government in ensuring that things do not slip through the net, that they do have the opportunity to have useful and helpful feedback about how they can go about their task to ensure that things do not slip through the net. They can be advised if problems appear to be occurring with the way they are implementing competition policy. It is not such an extraordinary notion.

Mr De Domenico is one of these people who think that cheapest is always best. That is Mr De Domenico's philosophy in relation to competition policy: Cheapest is always best. We in the Labor Party and other members of the Assembly do not think, and certainly members of the select committee did not think, Mr De Domenico, that cheapest is always best. They did not think you should get carte blanche to implement competition policy and that you could not make a mistake. Of course you can make mistakes. Of course you can do things wrongly. We are saying that we support the legislation - that is why we passed it, Mr De Domenico - but how you implement the legislation is a matter that is in your hands.

Mr De Domenico: No, it is in the Assembly's hands.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr De Domenico has obviously been to the same school of constitutional law as Mr Humphries, because he does not understand the difference between implementing legislation and passing legislation. Legislatures pass legislation, Mr De Domenico; governments implement it. You are the Government; you are implementing it. What we are saying is that there is a right way and a wrong way of implementing it. You need advice to ensure that issues such as social issues are not lost in the implementation, and we are suggesting that this forum is an essential part of that. That is why we are supporting this motion today. That is why Ms Follett's committee put the recommendation in the report in the first place.

I have to say that, regardless of whether this motion is passed or not, there is one area in which I tend to agree with some of the misgivings of Mr Humphries and Mr De Domenico. One concern I have is that, whether this motion is passed or not, the success of the implementation of competition policy and the effectiveness of the proposal encompassing this motion really still depend on the goodwill of the Government. If Mr De Domenico cannot get his head around the notion that there is more to life than cheapest is always best, it does not matter how many motions we pass, you will still get bad decisions out of the Government because the Government does not understand the fundamentals. What we are trying to do, Mr De Domenico, is to help you, and that is what this motion is about. It is about trying to help you, Mr De Domenico. If at the end of the day Mr De Domenico is beyond help, that will be a matter for the members of this parliament who supported Mr De Domenico. I do not carry with me great confidence in Mr De Domenico getting it right on this. All over Australia we are seeing conservative policies doing some fairly horrific things in the name of competition policy, and I do not have much reason to believe that Mr De Domenico will do it any differently. We can only try, Mr De Domenico, and that is what we are doing today.

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