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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2287 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, there may well be other matters concerning ACTTAB - matters of which I have not heard - that deserve investigation. That is why I believe that the terms of the inquiry I propose should not be drawn too narrowly. Certainly, they should be broad enough for the commissioner to look at an issue raised in this house back in February by the member for Ginninderra, Ms McRae, and the response given to her on that occasion by both the Chief Minister, Mrs Carnell, and the Minister for Sport, Mr Stefaniak. Ms McRae had raised at question time the suggestion that the ACT Racing Club and/or the ACTTAB had been paying rebates to a punter at the betting auditorium. Mr Stefaniak passed the question on to Mrs Carnell and Mrs Carnell declared in her answer that, not only had the Government heard reports of this practice, which would be contrary to the agreement between ACTTAB and the Victorian superTAB, but it had had those reports investigated. I will quote:

What we did immediately was call in an independent auditor, Deloittes -

she told the Assembly -

to do a full review of the situation involved. We believed that it was important -

I am still quoting from Mrs Carnell's answer -

to get to the bottom of the matter very quickly. Even the slight chance that there was something happening at that level was something that we certainly were not willing to risk. We got the report back from Deloittes a week or so ago. Deloittes have said quite categorically that there is no problem; that the TAB is not paying any form of rebate to large punters.

Mr Speaker, the extraordinary thing about this finding by Deloittes was that no-one had suggested that the TAB was actually handing over the rebate cash. The grumbling from punters not favoured with a sling themselves was that the ACT Racing Club was secretly providing the money to the favoured few from its share of TAB revenues.

So Ms McRae, back in April, asked a second question, in which she referred to a Canberra Times article in which Mr Ray Alexander of the ACT Racing Club admitted that the Racing Club had been paying commissions but said that the payments had stopped after receiving a letter from the Chief Minister. Quite reasonably, Ms McRae wanted to know whether the Racing Club, in making those payments, had been in breach of its agreement with ACTTAB. Mrs Carnell evaded the question by saying that the ACT Racing Club was not a government agency and did not operate under government direction.

Now, I am not suggesting today that Mrs Carnell has been involved in any improper practice. Less than frank she may have been, but she is as innocent a victim in this sorry story of secret rebates as Wayne Berry was in the saga of VITAB. On this occasion the problem lies not with politicians, except in so far as we prevent the truth from being told,

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