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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3701 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

the legislation is appropriate and necessary. The legislation also provides for Ministers to make references to the commission for reports on regulated industries in relation to the conduct of those industries and confidentiality arrangements in relation to those recommendations.

Mr Speaker, I want particularly to highlight a couple of concerns I have in relation to the Bill. The first is that this legislation has been before the Assembly only since September - not, in the scheme of the debate about competition policy, a particularly long period of time. Whilst we are all aware of how long the debate about competition policy in Australia has been going on, I do not think that excuses the Government for presenting legislation of this complexity so close to their own deadlines and providing so little opportunity for a clear understanding of the implications of the legislation.

I want particularly to draw attention to one matter about which I am not entirely satisfied, that is, the issues relating to the interaction between the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Commission's role and the role of other watchdogs in the industry, such as the ACCC. According to this Bill, disputes about access can be resolved by arbitration determinations by the commission. These arbitration determinations can include a requirement on the access provider to give access to specified services to a third party, the third party being a retailer; a requirement that the third party accept and pay for access to services, which is quite reasonable; a determination of the terms and conditions of access; a requirement that the access provider extend infrastructure facilities; and a determination of the extent to which the determination is to override any earlier determination. The Bill goes on to say that the determination shall not require the access provider - that is, the infrastructure owner - to bear any of the costs of extending infrastructure facilities or of maintaining such extensions.

Mr Speaker, that goes to the nub of what I think is a very important issue in relation to competition in these industries, because here we have a situation where infrastructure owners can, effectively, decline to extend infrastructure to allow retailers to sell their product to customers. For example, someone who owns a gas pipeline infrastructure or electricity transmission infrastructure is not obliged to extend that infrastructure to allow a third party - that is, a retailer - to sell their services. This raises community service obligations - that is, obligations to supply. It also raises issues about how the service provider may conduct themselves in the marketplace, particularly if the infrastructure owner also has an interest in the retail business. To a certain extent, those things may be able to be regulated by the ACCC acting against anti-competitive behaviour, but that raises the spectre of two commissions - the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Commission and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission - having an interest in the matter to do with the extension of infrastructure.

On the face of the briefings that I have seen so far, I am not completely satisfied that those conflicts are adequately resolved. The pace with which the Government is determined to go on with this matter means that we may need to come back to this legislation and have another look at it. I am particularly concerned about a situation in which a retailer might be asked to pay for extending infrastructure facilities which would then be owned by somebody else, which would then be owned by the infrastructure owner - the access provider. That, to me, is a rather bizarre state of affairs.

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