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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3704 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I would like to thank the Minister for making available to me and my office public servants who have given us a thorough briefing and who were able to answer each of our questions on the issues. One small example of that is the concern raised by my office about what is meant by "reasonable excuse" in clause 40 of the Bill. A response came back to us quite rapidly. It was a very thorough response. At the conclusion of the response it was said, "I hope this response answers all of your questions and your concerns regarding the clause. If you have any other questions, please do not hesitate to contact the appropriate person". That is the sort of positive response that we got. I have to say that it is great to see ACT public servants so enthusiastic about what they are doing. Their enthusiasm certainly came through in this series of briefings.

I had concerns over a couple of other issues. Mr Whitecross covered a number of the issues that were of concern to me. Others were raised by the Scrutiny of Bills Committee. A number of amendments are to be moved in order to deal with the issues that I had some concerns about. They have been put on the table and circulated in either Mr Kaine's name or Mr Whitecross's name. I think it is appropriate for us to deal with those amendments at the detail stage.

Ms Tucker also has raised a number of issues. I have looked at her amendments, many of which seem very sensible to me; but I will listen to the debate on those because I have had them for only a relatively short time. She did raise a very important point about the issue of commercial-in-confidence. Since I have been in the Assembly - since 1989 - I have felt particularly uncomfortable about that. I have spoken about it on quite a number of occasions, but it has not taken the highest priority for me in terms of the work that I wanted to achieve. I think Ms Tucker is quite right in noting that it seems to be coming up more and more often. I think it is appropriate for us to establish what sorts of criteria should apply to commercial-in-confidence, because it is becoming the great hidy-hole of anything that a government does not want to have out in a public forum.

I remember an Independent member of the Federal Parliament, Ted Mack, saying to me that when he was mayor of North Sydney they had no such thing as commercial-in-confidence once something went past the tender stage. Obviously, commercial-in-confidence applies to tendering, but if somebody put something in to council once the tender process had gone through it was open for anybody to see. That was at a time, by the way, when North Sydney had the most rapid development of any part of Australia. Commercial-in-confidence is something that really does need to be looked at. I think it would be very interesting to talk to Mr Mack about how that operated in North Sydney from his perspective and to talk to the bureaucrats who were there about what the system was, how they handled it and whether it still exists. It would be very interesting to see whether it still exists in North Sydney. Mr Speaker, I think there are some issues there. I am very happy to support the establishment of the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Commission and will be looking at the individual issues on a case-by-case basis.

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