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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 11 Hansard (6 November) . . Page.. 3749 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

and, in particular, if we believe that having a number of generators competing with each other is not going to lead to a situation where there is more generation capacity in Australia than we actually need, then I think people are not very good students of how competitive markets work. Of course there will be a tendency in a competitive market for people to build generation capacity, with a view to competing with other people, the other generators. If they no longer have a commercial interest in the other generators, of course they have more reason to want to build surplus capacity to try to take market share off other generators. It is just not sustainable that, as the Government says, there will be no more excess generation capacity in the marketplace as a result of this legislation.

Similarly, Mr Speaker, I do not think the Government will have their fond hopes realised if they believe that a commercial market for wholesale electricity will lead to a flourishing of environmentally friendly technologies for the generation of electricity. It will continue to be a matter for governments to pursue as a matter of policy if we are to ensure that environmentally friendly technologies for the generation of power come up and take their place in the supply of electricity in the national electricity market, because it simply cannot be presumed, as the Minister does, that environmental technologies, which as Ms Tucker has pointed out cost 6c a kilowatt-hour more than other sources of electricity at the moment, will suddenly become commercially viable because we have a national electricity market. Governments need to play an active role in securing a more environmentally sustainable future. They cannot, as Mr Kaine would have it, simply leave that to the market.

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (4.19): Just referring briefly to the general comments that Mr Whitecross made about the increase in capacity to generate electricity, before I come to the question of his specific amendments: I think we could have an interesting debate about that. The fact is that the power-generating companies cannot incrementally increase their capacity. If they are going to increase their capacity, they have to make a big infrastructure investment. Power stations do not come in one-fifths, one-tenths or one-halves; power stations come as complete power stations. Any power generator who is in competition with a number of others and who is contemplating increasing his capacity to generate additional energy so that he can get his bigger share of the market is going to do it only after consideration of a massive investment of money to secure a very large increment in his capacity because he cannot increase his capacity in small doses. I think my assessment of a future market is probably closer than Mr Whitecross's; although, as I say, we could have an interesting debate about the nature of supply and demand in the electrical energy business over the next 10 to 20 years if we chose to.

To deal specifically with the amendments that Mr Whitecross has put forward: The Government does not support these amendments because, in our view, they are meaningless and, in fact, quite irrational. These amendments that we were seeking to make exclude bodies which, as Mr Whitecross rightly pointed out, are not subject to FOI legislation anywhere else in Australia. We are going to be unique if we try to make them subject to our FOI Act. But the more interesting fact is that they are not ACT corporations; they are national bodies and will not be subject to ACT FOI legislation or any other FOI legislation, no matter what sort of Bill we put through. I do not quite

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