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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2185 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

If this is a company like what those opposite are suggesting, I cannot believe that they would be registered to operate in securities markets or in equity markets, Mr Speaker, or as merchant bankers in this country. Those sorts of things require companies of good standing. It seems the only people who do not believe they are of good standing are the people opposite.

MS McRAE: I refer, again, to the consultancy through which you have employed Fay Richwhite and Associates to do a study of ACTEW, and my question is to the Chief Minister. Yesterday, in answer to Mr Corbell's question about Fay Richwhite and Associates, and again today, you stated that you were happy to employ them and they are "of very good standing". When you engaged Fay Richwhite and Associates to conduct the audit of ACTEW were you aware that Fay Richwhite and Associates have been involved in tax rorts in the Cook Islands which are estimated to have cost the Australian taxpayers millions of dollars, and tax rorts which are estimated to have cost the New Zealand Government between $2m and $4m and the Japanese Revenue Office up to $400m? Do you stand by your statement that they are of good standing?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, Fay Richwhite and Associates, as I said before, have been employed by most governments in this country. A Fay Richwhite executive, Dr Paul Moy, is a member of a three-person task force and a senior author of a report into the structural reform of the Queensland electricity supply industry. This report involved the most extensive analysis of structural reform of the electricity sector in any jurisdiction and did not recommend privatisation. Dr Moy is also chairman of the Distribution Review Committee in New South Wales - there is a Labor government in New South Wales - which is about the structure of the distribution sector in that State and not about privatisation. Dr Moy is also the independent chair of a key audit commissioned by all governments in the preparation of national competition policy agreements.

Fay Richwhite are an organisation or a company that are used by a lot of governments, but they are also used by an awful lot of people in the private sector as well. I think only about 25 per cent of their business, from memory, is involved in the public sector. I think the rest is involved in the private sector. They are involved in lots of parts of the financial industry. If those opposite suggest that Fay Richwhite are involved in dubious ethics, I think they should walk outside this house right now and say that. If they have one skerrick of real proof about something like dubious ethics, they should have the guts to say it where Fay Richwhite have some capacity to stand up and say that it is not true and prove categorically that it is not true.

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