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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (4 November) . . Page.. 3574 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The members of this Assembly have a responsibility to their constituents to find out how legislation before them will affect the lives of their constituents. This involves a responsibility to ensure that national uniform legislation does not have an adverse impact on the community and does not limit the capacity of our local legislature to promote social justice and environmental objectives, the economic wellbeing of the local community, maintenance of basic wage and work conditions for residents of the ACT and other important community concerns. So, it is up to the 17 members in this Assembly to look very carefully at all pieces of legislation, debate the consequences for the ACT and then ensure that all the interests I have just mentioned are protected.

Many of the issues that have been raised by members over the past two days are not new. A big concern with all the agreements and legislation is the lack of specific criteria to assess public interest. There has been a lot of rhetoric about community service obligations, but little detail. We are still seeing the consequences of that when we have our Estimates Committee hearings and we ask questions about the community service obligations aspect of government service agencies. We keep getting the answer that it is not their responsibility, basically. A good example, of course, would be housing. We are continually told that it is about bricks and mortar, but we have to see where the community service obligations aspect of housing is fitting into the Government's work.

Also, the issue of freedom of information and commercial confidentiality is very important in this whole issue of competition policy, because we can lose accountability when the private sector is seen to be doing business with the public sector. A number of inquiries actually have occurred and have reported, or are currently under way, looking at the commercial-in-confidence issue in this time when we have the growing likelihood of government working with the private sector. Something that comes out quite clearly from all those reports and investigations is that there have to be different rules for the private sector if it is working with government. This is a bottom line that it is going to have to understand. I am looking forward to the current inquiry in Victoria to see what it comes out with on this subject.

Of course, the environmental aspects of this are very important and have been an ongoing concern. The Federal Government before this one actually had an independent forum, similar to the one that is now set up in the ACT, which had on it representatives of the ACF or other community environmental experts, to review any legislation in terms of its impact on the environment. The current water Bill that we are looking at in the ACT is an example of imposing market principles, and trading water certainly raises some concerns. I have grave concerns about certain aspects of that. If we look at the current crisis of our river systems in Australia, I cannot believe that any of us could feel even vaguely complacent about how, to date, we have been managing our water and the sale of water in rural areas. It is alarming, to say the least, to see this rather vague Bill that we have been presented with. But that is something that, I guess, we will be debating later on.

In the Select Committee on Competition Policy Reform we actually made a couple of recommendations about the involvement of other members of this place. We also recommended that there be an independent forum established, which was initially rejected by the Government; but when we re-presented it in the form of a motion it got the numbers. So, that panel has been working for some time. I understand that it has been

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