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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (4 November) . . Page.. 3514 ..

Ms McRae: Mr Speaker, I take a point of order. Anything that is talked about in public hearings can be talked about in the Assembly. Only the deliberations of the committee are private, and they have not been had; so, Mr Speaker, I would say that Mr Moore is entirely in order.

MR SPEAKER: I would still remind Mr Moore to be cautious.

MR MOORE: Thank you for the reminder, Mr Speaker. I will be very careful about that. Ms McRae is right; I was referring only to things that were very public. I also take the Chief Minister's point about relevance and I will draw in that relevance, Mr Speaker, because it does allow Territory-owned corporations effectively to borrow on behalf of the Territory. It is a very simple system. We take a dividend from ACTEW and ACTEW in turn, through the Central Financing Unit, borrows the $100m. We can then say, "Look, we have not borrowed at all. We have taken a dividend from a Territory-owned corporation" - it could apply to other Territory-owned corporations as well - "They are the ones doing the borrowing and we, as a government, have not borrowed a single dollar".

Mr Speaker, I think it is becoming clearer and clearer to the community that adopting that sort of system really is not being completely open and frank. I think it is very important for us to recognise that Australian accounting standards say that this particular system is a form of borrowing and our own Auditor-General says that this specific use of the system could best be described as borrowing; whereas the Chief Minister and others in the Government continue saying, "We are not borrowing" - although, to put it in perspective, I must say that the Auditor-General made the comment after the Chief Minister had insisted that she still had not borrowed a single dollar. I accept that the comments did come in that order during the latest Estimates Committee hearings. But from my observation we are talking about borrowing.

Since we are going to be having government borrowing, let us do it in the cheapest possible way. I think that is where the crunch comes, and that is why I am supporting this Bill. The Government wants to borrow $100m. They can take the dividend from ACTEW and tell ACTEW to go and borrow the money or let ACTEW borrow the money, but it is finally a matter for the board's decision as to how it does the borrowing. But if it is going to do so, there is no point in having ACTEW borrowing the money at the more expensive rate on behalf of the Government. It is far better that ACTEW does its borrowing through the Central Financing Unit and gets the advantage of the AAA credit rating and borrows at up to 0.2 per cent cheaper, because 0.2 per cent on $100m is quite a lot of money.

Mr Speaker, it seems to me that those are the issues before us. But, whatever the set-up, it is sensible that the Central Financing Unit be the one that is used for the borrowings. I will continue to use the word "borrowings", Mr Speaker, because borrowings is what they are and borrowing is what the Government has been doing. That is why I like to use the word "borrowing".

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