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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 2517 ..

MR MOORE: I have a supplementary question. With the wisdom of hindsight, Chief Minister, would it not have been far better simply to allow the coroner's inquiry to go ahead and to cover this, rather than having any other inquiry in the first place?

MRS CARNELL: I still believe very strongly that the people of Canberra want answers. They want answers in a short time, not a long time. We had an opportunity to get some answers on the table; certainly not a whole coronial inquest; certainly not, as I explained on many occasions, any answers on what actually happened with regard to the demolition or the unfortunate death of Katie Bender. But we could have had on the table some answers on the tender process, to ensure that that process was conducted properly. Unfortunately, this Assembly, and particularly those opposite, chose not to allow that to happen and came up with terms of reference that were much broader and that the coroner said took the risk of impacting upon the coroner's inquiry. They decided to go ahead. Again, if we had ended up with the inquiry as it was first put on the table, Mr Speaker, we would now, I hope, have some answers.

MR CORBELL: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, yesterday in the Assembly you were asked a question about the Unisys People project. Since a majority of the training for the project occurred in Sydney and Melbourne and not Canberra, you were asked how many jobs created on this project were in Sydney and Melbourne, not Canberra. Chief Minister, as you were unable to answer this question yesterday, can you provide more detailed information to the Assembly today? Can you also inform the Assembly how much demand there has been for the consultants trained so far by the Millennium Training Centre in the ACT, which, I should remind you, is the training centre set up by the CIT in November last year following your grand announcement of the Unisys training scheme?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I have to say that I do not know how I would know how many jobs were created in the private sector in Sydney or Melbourne. It would be impossible to know. Mr Speaker, yesterday I explained to the Assembly how many training courses had happened here in the ACT. I explained that training courses were planned for September and November. I said I believed that the take-up was significantly slower than I would have liked it to be. Similarly, the take-up of the whole issue of the millennium problem has been far too slow, both in government and in the private sector, not just in Australia but around the world.

We are starting to see a change on that now, with the Federal Government and other governments around Australia requiring their departments to come up with plans on how they are going to address the problem. We believe that that will up the ante, shall we say, on the number of Unisys people who will be employed. It is very important to realise that there are no ACT business incentive funds in this particular approach. This is a joint venture between CIT - - -

Mr Corbell: A thousand jobs. You have taken the credit for the thousand jobs and now you are backing away at a million miles an hour.

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