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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (13 November) . . Page.. 4153 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

One of the issues that I found quite surprising - and Mr Hird has certainly claimed this to be his view - was that there was consultation because there was a tender process. I have heard some pretty interesting definitions of consultation in the time I have been in this Assembly, but that one takes the prize. A tender process cannot possibly be called consultation. Then we get the other argument of why on earth would you talk to competitors in a commercial market to see what the impact of this proposal would be on them; that that, equally, would be quite inappropriate. I can see some logic in that. Why would you ask a competitor what they thought of a new player coming into the market?

That actually brings me back to the whole idea of a social plan. The same argument comes up over and over again with the retail discussion. Why, in the name of competition, do we allow a free-for-all and think that society generally is going to benefit? There are unfair advantages. Some players in the open market have a competitive advantage. In the case of retail, it is the large businesses because of economies of scale and so on. So, when we allow further retail expansion, the big players in our society are winning all the time. We know how many small businesses are going out of business. We see how Woolworths, Coles and so on are always the winners. We see how they purposefully provide the goods in their shops at a lower price to wipe out those small businesses. It is what happens. Woolworths has a publicly-stated aim to take over most of the retail sector by doing this. It is fair game; this is how the competitive market works. Once again, right now we have the same problem. We have a couple of private hospitals operating already and we are allowing another one to be built. That one obviously will have an advantage if it is co-located with a public hospital's accident and emergency section. There is an obvious disadvantage for John James because they do not have that. I think that is a reasonable reason to question whether it is fair trading to offer that.

I will go through all of the recommendations briefly. Basically, the first recommendation is actually looking at the need for more private beds in the ACT. I know this is after the fact and it might all seem a bit hopeless in one way; but I think for the record it is important to work out why things went wrong, so that, hopefully, we can stop them going wrong in the future. There can be lessons learnt from this. The second recommendation requests the Standing Committee on Public Accounts to examine the principle of commercial-in-confidence. Members are well aware of my often expressed concerns about this matter. I think it is a real issue for us in the committee system generally, not just in the Assembly, that we do indeed look closely at where commercial-in-confidence is used and get some clear understanding of where its use is, in fact, legitimate and where it is not. Often it is and often it is just almost a sacred symbol under which we classify anything that has to do with a private company.

The third recommendation is that the Attorney-General request the Government Solicitor to examine the contract and other agreements. This is about whether it is fair or not. The fourth recommendation is that the Auditor-General examine the arrangements between the Government and Health Care of Australia, and that the Auditor-General monitor those arrangements. Once again, this is about fairness. The recommendation about the Canberra Hospital entering into arrangements with the National Capital Private Hospital concerning access to accident and emergency is about fairness, too. That is about unfair advantage.

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