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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1737 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

deal of thought, I must say, and on balance, decided that we would not allow the Government to proceed with its investments in terms of derivatives, and Mrs Carnell was part of that decision. Ms Tucker has not proposed that we prevent the Government from going ahead with one investment or another, or make one or other investment a disallowable instrument. That is the way the speech of the Chief Minister went.

I must thank the Chief Minister for providing her officers to give us a briefing on these issues. In fact, they went further than that and provided us with notes on this particular issue. In that discussion at that time I drew it to the attention of her officers that the notes that they had reflected, as far as I was concerned, a misunderstanding of what was in the proposed amendment. The proposed amendment is not about whether or not you can go ahead with one particular investment or not; it is about the tabling of the guidelines.

Clause 38 says that the Territory can go ahead and invest in a series of ways - on deposit with a bank; in the purchase of a bill of exchange; in a loan to a dealer in the short-term money market; in Territory, State or Commonwealth securities; or in any prescribed investment. The prescribed investment is done by the Territory setting out a set of guidelines. It is entirely appropriate for this Assembly to say that we think that that new set of guidelines is reasonable or not reasonable, and the disallowable instrument is a most appropriate way of going about that. We can either amend those guidelines or reject those guidelines as the case may be, in effectively the same way as when there was a proposal to do our investment through derivatives.

Mrs Carnell says that there is nothing in this legislation that would allow derivatives. However, they provide an example of a set of financial investments which this Assembly decided ought not proceed. As I recall, Mr Speaker, and I may be corrected, that happened after the matter went through a process in the Public Accounts Committee. Whatever the process was, I remember a significant amount of discussion on the issue anyway, and we decided that it ought not proceed.

These guidelines being subject to a disallowable instrument is an entirely appropriate way to go, and I would urge the Chief Minister to reconsider her opposition to it. I can understand opposition to specific investments, but that is not what is being talked about here. It is the guidelines that need to come before the Assembly, and this is a most appropriate amendment. I must thank Ms Tucker for bringing it to the attention of the Assembly.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (6.07): Mr Speaker, I feel most reluctant to introduce philosophy at this hour, but a recurring theme of amendments coming from people on the crossbenches is this notion that we can turn the legislature into some sort of arm of the Executive. We have a system of responsible government in Australia and in this Territory. We have a Government that, enjoying the confidence of the house, goes off to perform the functions of the Executive. In this case one of the functions of the Executive is managing the money of the Territory.

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