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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 3 Hansard (10 April) . . Page.. 854 ..

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (11.38): I indicated earlier in the week that I had some reservations about going ahead with the inquiry that Mr Corbell is proposing. In fact, Mr Hird has generally summarised the problems that I see with it. I think there are none of us here who would argue that we do not want to know what the benefits and costs to Canberra are going to be. The question is whether a study entered into now will produce the answers. I am not satisfied that it will, but I have no objection to the Economic Development and Tourism Committee looking at that. Once they sit down and examine what evidence is available to them, given that the evidence before the existing evaluation committee is commercial-in-confidence and will not be available to the Economic Development and Tourism Committee, I wonder what information it can gather that it does not already have after having read the newspapers. I think that is a question the committee is going to have to look at. It may come back, once it has looked at the reality, and say that the reporting date should be March next year, after the evaluation is over and after the information is available to allow the questions that Mr Corbell is posing to be properly addressed; but that is for the committee to determine. As I say, I have already expressed my concerns about that.

Having said that, if the Assembly decides this morning that it should go to the committee, I think there are probably some things that they can do, so I will address my comments specifically to the amendments proposed by Ms Horodny. I do not know what Ms Horodny thinks the existing evaluation committee is doing. There is a tripartite evaluation committee. A determination has already been made that a fast train link between Sydney and Canberra is feasible. What they are now looking at is which of the contenders will do the job. They are not going to have any interest whatsoever in what a committee of the Legislative Assembly might say in terms of evaluating the bids for the construction of a high speed train. They are already doing that. They are part way through that evaluation. There is nothing that this Assembly committee can adduce from the evidence available to it that, in my view, will affect in any way what that evaluation committee is doing; so the first amendment, to my mind, is meaningless.

It also seems to rest on the assumption that the evaluation committee is not already looking at these things. I am absolutely confident that the terms of reference require them to examine the economic, technological and environmental impact of this train. That means bad ones as well as good ones. Why Ms Horodny thinks that a committee of this Assembly can do a better job with that than the people who have been involved in the process for months and are informed and have all of the information available to them, information which will not be available to our committee, is beyond me. I think that her first amendment is meaningless.

The whole approach to questions like this by the Greens fascinates me because the argument is that if we have a fast train people might be encouraged to go and live in Sydney rather than live in Canberra. I can just imagine ourselves back in the 1950s and 1960s when discussions were taking place about upgrading the highway between Sydney and Canberra. The Greens would have said, "We cannot upgrade the highway.

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