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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 4100 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

in Denver, Colorado - to do business in South Australia. I am happy to table a copy of the article for members if they wish. No; perhaps I will wait and see whether Mrs Carnell tables her press clippings first. Chief Minister, in this article, you are reported as saying:

We're in there with the best of them. But once the package (of government incentives) got over $20m we bailed out.

Chief Minister, $20m sounds like an awful lot of money to me. Can you inform the Assembly what the ACT would have been getting for the $20m that you were offering to an American company? Will you table the documents on which you based your bid?

MRS CARNELL: In terms of hypotheticals and longbows, this is a very interesting question. I am very concerned about those opposite so far in question time; they have suggested that I do not know the difference between a progressive tax and a regressive tax.

Mr Berry: You proved that yourself.

MRS CARNELL: Mr Berry showed this week that he did not know the difference between expenditure and revenue; I have to tell you, Mr Speaker. With regard to Teletech, as I understand it, Teletech did come to the ACT, as they did to other States. Negotiations continued with Teletech. There were quite a number of jobs involved, I have to say, with regard to a call centre. Negotiations continued until it was obvious that they were after an amount or a package that the ACT did not believe was appropriate for the number of jobs that were on offer. It was simply out of our league; so, we bailed out before we actually put a final offer on the table. They were in a different league; that is fine. South Australia got them.

We are not in the business of buying companies. Obviously, negotiations that were in place included, as they always would under our business incentive scheme, things such as payroll tax; possibly relocation money; possibly land - all those sorts of normal things that are very much on the record. But I have to say that the ACT Government will never get into the business that some States, South Australia being one of them, do, and that is simply buying businesses. It has to be a good deal; it has to be something that the ACT will get a good return on, or we are not in the game; and I will stick by that forever.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, I have a supplementary question. Chief Minister, if offering $20m to Teletech to locate in Canberra is not buying business, if offering over $6m to the Bega cheese factory to locate a packaging plant in Canberra is not buying business, what is buying business? How many other companies have you offered $6m, $10m or $20m packages to, that we have not heard about, to get them to come to Canberra? Was the Fujitsu deal anything like $20m; or will you not tell us?

MRS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, is this part of the inquiry? I thought Mr Whitecross's committee was actually having an inquiry into ACTBIS. If Mr Whitecross and other members would actually like me to give them a little bit of a run over the target on how the business incentive scheme works, I am very happy to do so. That is what I am going to have to do, because obviously you do not understand it.

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