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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 8 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 2658 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

This Bill and this enterprise CanDeliver are only bandaids. I am all for applying the bandaid; but it is only a bandaid, because the problem they are trying to fix, the cut that is bleeding, the flow of jobs from Canberra, cannot be stopped by initiatives like this. It can only be slowed down, Mr Speaker. The only way to stop it is for the Federal Liberal Government to reverse their policies. Would it not be nice to have a Chief Minister who went to the Federal Liberal Government and said, "Your policy is wrong; your policy is hurting Canberra."? But not in Canberra. In Canberra we have a Chief Minister who says, "I solidly support you. Right on. That is the way to go. Do it some more". In the meantime, they are applying the bandaid. Better to apply the bandaid than do nothing, but better to treat the real problem rather than to just apply the bandaid.

The CanDeliver initiative is a good way, on paper, of ensuring that we can keep at least some of the jobs which John Howard is intent on pushing out of Canberra. So let us be grateful, at least, for that. We have not much to be thankful to the Chief Minister for on this score, because she solidly supports contracting them out, ending up in other parts of Australia or even New Zealand; but at least we can be grateful that she has found one bandaid left in the first aid kit and she is going to apply that.

My disappointment at the Chief Minister's approach, after my initial relief that at least she found the one bandaid in her first aid kit, is because we heard today in question time that they have just lost their first contract. They went in the first time and said, "Yes, we want to do some work with this new CanDeliver thing". The first time up they did not make the short list. The Chief Minister has had a day, probably two days - maybe longer if she knew about it before we all read about it in the Canberra Times - to find out what went wrong and to say, "I announced this great initiative. I put the press release out. I appeared on television. I got my name in the paper. I was happy to go on radio. I was happy to make myself available to every media opportunity in town to promote this thing. But now I read in the paper that it has fallen over at the first hurdle. What has gone wrong?". She has had a day-and-a-half, maybe longer, to find out.

So what happened when we asked her the question today? She replied, "Don't know; don't know. I am not worried about that. I am worried about the next press release because we have put in one for Administrative Services. We are onto the next press release now. Let us not talk about the contract we did not get with Finance; let us get onto the next one, the next press release, the Administrative Services press release. Let us not talk about the one that fell over".

Mr Speaker, I think CanDeliver has the potential to be a good initiative. It does. But it is going to be a good initiative only if it has the serious backing of the Chief Minister, the so-called Minister for Business, and active interest. She must understand what is going wrong and what is going right, so that she can be sure, and we can all be sure, that CanDeliver can deliver what it promises, and that it is not just delivering media opportunities for the Chief Minister.

I do not care about media opportunities for the Chief Minister, Mr Speaker. What I care about is jobs for Canberrans. I would like to see a few less media releases from the Chief Minister and a few more jobs for Canberrans. That will happen when Mrs Carnell devotes some of her time to looking at the policy, actually asking

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