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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (4 November) . . Page.. 3512 ..

Mr Kaine: I take a point of order, Mr Speaker.

MR WHITECROSS: Notwithstanding all that, the Labor Party will be supporting the legislation.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Sit down, Mr Whitecross. A point of order has been taken.

Mr Kaine: I think Mr Whitecross is stretching the rules of debate in introducing his last argument, which has nothing to do with the legislation that we are debating.

MR SPEAKER: I uphold the point of order. The point is that Mr Whitecross has finished.

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (11.40): Mr Speaker, the Labor Party is obviously grasping at straws to find some issue on which it can go to the election, because Mr Whitecross says he supports the legislation and then he introduces a whole heap of extraneous and irrelevant issues in order to make some point which has no legs. His point seems to be, if I can sum it up, that the Government wants this legislation to allow ACTEW to borrow money because ACTEW has to borrow money to pay $100m to the Government. That simply is not the fact at all. ACTEW does not need to borrow money to cover the $100m dividend that it paid to the Government recently. There is no justification whatsoever for that assertion.

Mr Whitecross went on to say that, if that is not the case, ACTEW will have to borrow money next year to buy an asset. ACTEW will buy that asset next year if it is a good investment for them to do so, and they may or may not have to borrow money in order to do so. But if they do - and that has not been established yet - Mr Whitecross's argument has no legs because ACTEW has not told me, as one of the two voting shareholders, that they will have to borrow to buy an asset next year. I do not know whether they have told Mr Whitecross, but they have not told me. The point is that, if they do have to borrow, it will be in the nature of a capital investment. They will be spending money on buying an asset from which they expect to get a return. But it is highly speculative - and Mr Service made the point - whether they need to borrow at all and, if so, how much. It depends on what further capital investments they wish to make.

Like any corporation, if they wish to invest in some power generation system, if they want to buy a share in an existing power generation system or if they want to go into a joint venture with some other energy supply system or water supply system or something else, they may need to borrow money to get an equity in that venture. That is what every corporation does. But that is all totally irrelevant to this Bill, which merely allows corporations - not only ACTEW but also ACTTAB and Totalcare - to borrow money without having it appropriated by the Assembly first. That is what this Bill is about. It has nothing to do with how much ACTEW might or might not have to borrow in the future. But Mr Whitecross has entered into a debate on that. As I say, his argument has no legs. There is nothing to substantiate his assertion that ACTEW is necessarily going to have to borrow any money at all next year. I repeat that his argument is totally irrelevant to the legislation that is being debated by the house this morning.

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