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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2645 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Mr Speaker, this has been an issue of policy disagreement and not in any way a personal issue. If I cannot stand up in the media and make comment on how the operations of a government-owned agency impact on one of the biggest global environmental issues facing this planet without the threat of a law suit being slapped on me, then what is the point of being here? I would like to say again that I am not raising this issue for my own personal protection. In the event that Dr Sargent does proceed with a suit against me, any prospective changes to the ACT's legislation will not provide me with protection. However, in my discussion with other members on this issue over the past few weeks, it has become clear that there is real concern about the implications of this threat for free and rigorous public debate on all manner of topics that we believe to be in the public interest and on serious and important questions raised about what indeed the move to a businesslike public sector actually means.

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (4.33): Ms Tucker raises a very important question. I think it is one deserving of some debate here. At the crux of it is the degree to which we can hold people accountable, how we go about that, what we can say, given that we have some measure of privilege, and how far we can go without expecting some sort of response from people for going too far.

Taking the matter of public importance as it is expressed on the daily program, I would have to say that I agree totally with it. There is nothing in it that I could disagree with. It has three elements to it. I would like to comment on each of those three elements. The first is the right of members to scrutinise the performance of Territory-owned corporations. The second is that in that scrutiny we in the Assembly should have the ability to freely make reasonable public statements. The third is that we should be able to do that without fear of litigation.

Ms Tucker asserted that in outsourcing, corporatising and the like at times accountability questions are left behind. I do not believe that that is the case in the ACT at all. Each Territory-owned corporation is responsible to the Government shareholders and, through those Ministers, must at all times be ready and able to account to the Assembly for its actions. This is a fundamental requirement of responsible government, accountability for which rests with the Assembly and ultimately, of course, with the community. Corporatisation such as has been carried into effect with ACTEW entails putting a government body under intense scrutiny and asking the questions: Why and in what ways does that corporation fall short of the way in which a comparable commercial company would operate? To do that, we can look at their accounts and accounting practices. We can look at their objectives and try to define what their bottom line is. We can look at their pricing policies, their asset structure, their rate of return. We can look at their debt structure. We can also look at their regulatory regimes, including environmental safeguards. We can look at government subsidies paid to the body, what they are paid for and what they are used for. We can look at their relationships with customers and customers' rights, obligations and means of redress.

My point is that this level of scrutiny actually delivers an enormous amount of information to government. It forces Territory-owned corporations to justify practices that in the past and under different organisational arrangements may have simply developed in an ad hoc and unsystematic way and without any questioning whatsoever. Let me emphasise that

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