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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2656 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

To bring litigation against somebody in order to get them to stop saying that - that is what it was about - is where I think Dr Sargent was terribly wrong. What I hope will happen is that when Dr Sargent reads this Hansard - and I hope he does, and, if nobody else will, I am happy to send it to him - he will withdraw and he will back off from this approach.

To say that ACTEW is not involved at all, as Mr Humphries pointed out, is not true. I think they are very involved by omission. The ACTEW board has never come out and said, "This is not us. We disagree. We are not involved in this litigation". They have stood by and let it go. By the very act of standing by and not saying to Dr Sargent, "This is inappropriate", they have in fact become involved in it. It is all about ACTEW. It is all about a statement that was made about ACTEW, not a statement that was made about Dr Sargent. That is one of the things that really worry me about this whole notion of a corporatised body. Is the corporatised body a corporatised ACTEW, or are ACTEW and Dr Sargent the same thing? The irony is that he left a week-and-a-half later, so they could not be the same thing. It seems to me that what we have here is a very serious situation about an entirely inappropriate practice that is getting more and more legs. In the last two or three years we have seen this strategic litigation become part and parcel of the way people deal with each other. It is a bullying tactic. It is nothing other than a bullying tactic.

I would like to conclude by saying that there are many ways in which I admire Dr Sargent. I still admire Dr Sargent; but in this respect, on this action, I think he is terribly wrong. I use this opportunity to call on him to back off, to remove any threat of litigation, to let this issue go and to let us have a sensible debate on whether or not this contract fits in with ESD principles as is required in the Act.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: The discussion is concluded.

Debate resumed from 26 June 1997, on motion by Mrs Carnell:

That this Bill be agreed to in principle.

MR WHITECROSS (5.16): Mr Speaker, it is timely, having just debated the accountability of Territory-owned corporations, that we are amending the Territory Owned Corporations Act to add another one, this time CanDeliver. I am not going to speak for very long on this matter, I say bravely. What I want to say is this: The Labor Opposition supports the CanDeliver initiative. We support any initiative designed to ensure that the damage being caused to the ACT economy by the downgrading of the public sector and the ruthless contracting out of public sector jobs by the Howard Government, following in many respects the lead of the ACT Liberal Government, is minimised. An initiative like CanDeliver, which seeks to provide a framework through which smaller local companies can pool their resources to bid for Commonwealth contracts, is, on the face of it, a good initiative which has the potential to save at least some of the jobs lost to Canberra by the Howard Government's contracting out policies, and that has to be applauded.

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