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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2131 ..

Mr Wood: It is just the same approach.

MR HUMPHRIES: No, it is a very different approach. You put in Burmah on highly preferential terms, such as payment of minimal land rent, and I think you waived their rates and their land tax. That is not the way to create real competition in the market. Give somebody a tax holiday, and of course they will produce lower priced petrol. That is not the way to make a permanent difference in the petrol market in the ACT, as we saw from Burmah.

Burmah, as Mr Wood himself rightly said, has become a dud. It is not producing what the former Government aimed it to produce. Even while they were still in office it did not produce that. When we wrote to them and said, "What are you doing about providing leadership in petrol prices?", they said, "It is not our role to provide leadership. We only follow the market trends". Mr Speaker, I have to say that, if that is the legacy we got from the former Government, I think people will be glad to see a change of direction, and that is what we are now engineering.

Mr Speaker, the difference between us and the mob opposite is that we will be prepared to make sure that any policy which sees the creation of new players in the ACT marketplace is a fair policy, a realistic policy and a sustainable policy. You cannot say that of anything done by the former Government in the area of petrol. It was all about quick fixes and worry about the headache the next morning. Of course, the whole of Canberra has had to deal with the headache that came around from the next morning in that particular case.

MR WOOD (5.57): Mr Speaker, I must put the record straight. Mr Humphries tries to rewrite history. It was certainly the case that after Burmah came in the then Government advertised and called for tenders on a number of other sites - I think four sites - around this city. It was very clearly the case - it is vivid in my memory, because I was paying attention to it most carefully at the time - that numbers of proposals came in. However, the election intervened. The government changed and this new Government did not proceed until some considerable time later. Mr Humphries is now carrying out, despite his denials, exactly the same policy, belatedly, that the former Government put in place some time ago.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (5.58): Mr Speaker, I do have to respond to that. I can categorically assure this place that when we came to office there was only one player with a continuing interest in those sites in the ACT, and that was Gull Petroleum, which I met soon after coming to office. We said to them - - -

Mr Wood: Who is coming in now.

MR HUMPHRIES: They have been there all the time. They have not just come in; they have been there all the time. We said to them, "If you wish to continue to build a petrol station site as provided by the previous Government, we will honour that agreement; so go right ahead". They said to us, "We have to consider whether it is worth while

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