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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3748 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

I am arguing that commercial-in-confidence matters, matters in relation to their competitive commercial activities, should be subject to the FOI Act; but there may be other matters. They may relate to accommodation sought by an instrumentality acting as an agent of NEMMCO or NECA; they may relate to employment matters; they may relate to other matters of a non-commercial nature. It is appropriate that the FOI Act should apply in those cases.

Similarly, Mr Speaker, I see no reason why the Public Interest Disclosure Act should not apply in relation to the activities of ACTEW, which is owned by the people of Canberra, simply because, on the particular occasion in question, they happened to be acting as an agent of NEMMCO or NECA. The Public Interest Disclosure Act is there to protect the interests of the community in relation to things that they own. I believe that, provided all the provisions of the Public Interest Disclosure Act are complied with, there is no reason why it should not apply to ACTEW in relation to these matters. We all like to find reasons why we should exempt ourselves from the FOI Act or exempt ourselves from the Public Interest Disclosure Act. Who can forget, Mr Speaker, that when ACTEW was corporatised by this Government they tried to exempt the whole corporation from the FOI Act and the Public Interest Disclosure Act? In relation to those matters, I believe that the case has not been made out; that we ought to keep our safeguard legislation in place.

Mr Speaker, the other matter related to the Ombudsman Act. I am less concerned about that because, in relation to customers of ACTEW, as related to this current matter, we are going to be talking about people who operate in the commercial market. There are other watchdogs, such as the ACCC, available for those people, and I think perhaps that is a more appropriate direction for people to take in respect of any disputes they have with ACTEW in relation to those matters. That is the justification for the amendments that I have put forward in the detail stage.

Mr Speaker, in conclusion: As we are considering the final piece of the package of legislation regarding the adoption of the ACT's participation in the national scheme, I thought I should just return briefly to a claim which was made by the Minister in his speech in support of the national scheme. I thought there were some rather heroic statements made, and I just thought I should put on the record my scepticism about them. The Minister, in preaching about the benefits of the national scheme - and there are many benefits, as I have already said - said, "There will be a commercial environment that is far better suited to the introduction of more environmentally friendly technologies and practices than we have seen in the past". He went on to discuss how, in the bad old days, giant supply monopolies in New South Wales and Victoria built generation plants that were in excess of demand, meaning that higher costs were passed on to consumers. He said that, in the brave new world of competition, this sort of irrational behaviour of building generation capacity in excess of demand would no longer happen. He then went on to say that there would be all these wonderful market signals which would ensure that these organisations who owned coal-fired power stations would all be falling over themselves to produce generators using environmentally friendly power.

Mr Speaker, as I have already said, we support a national electricity market. If we believe this nonsense from the Government that somehow the national electricity market is going to make all the generators in Australia suddenly environmentally friendly, which is going to lead to a flourishing of environmentally friendly technology,

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