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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1425 ..

MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Ms Horodny, are you going to move the amendment that you circulated, or are you just circulating it?

MS HORODNY: I am happy to move my amendment to Mr Corbell's amendments. I move:

Paragraph (5), omit all words after "placement", substitute "of a ban on the incineration of pesticides and agricultural chemicals at the facility".

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (5.02): Madam Deputy Speaker, I am speaking to the principal motion. As Mr Humphries has said already, the Government in general supports all of the elements of this motion and they are already in place or they soon will be; so to some degree this motion is unnecessary and this debate is unnecessary. Mr Humphries has dealt at great length already with the environmental issues in this debate, and, I should think, to Mr Osborne's complete satisfaction, although I will wait to hear him say so.

I would like to talk briefly about the impact of those issues on Totalcare as a business, and it is a business. It is a government-owned business. Some will remember that Totalcare was established back in 1991. It was the first Territory-owned corporation under the Territory Owned Corporations Act 1990. Before that the business conducted by Totalcare was operated as the Health Services Division of ACT Health. It had an enormous excess capacity when we took it over from the Commonwealth and that excess capacity was costing the ACT taxpayers millions of dollars a year. We turned it into a corporation so that it could become a commercially oriented organisation and take that subsidy off the taxpayers.

Among other things, Totalcare continues to provide a number of key support services to the health industry, including laundering of linen, sterilising and maintenance of surgical instruments, and waste management for disposal of clinical and other wastes. Let me stress that these are essential services and that they are provided to both the private sector and the public sector. For example, Totalcare receives clinical waste not only from hospitals but also from medical and dental surgeries in Canberra. The benefits of these services to the community include the proper disposal of needles and other sharps that have been of major concern to this community over recent years.

Totalcare, as a commercial operation, is also a very significant employer in the ACT. With the recent transfer to that organisation of the public works and commercial services group of the Urban Services Department, employment at Totalcare has risen from just over 200 to around 700. It is also an important business in the Territory, returning a profit to its shareholders - they happen to be the Chief Minister and me - and we receive that profit as trustees for the ACT community.

Mrs Carnell: We are not going to South America with it?

MR KAINE: No. In 1995-96 the turnover of this operation was $16m and the after-tax profit was $483,000, of which half was declared as a dividend and paid into Consolidated Revenue.

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