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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4325 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Indeed, Mr Speaker, the Government should not be making a decision about the train without considering all of the effects that the train will have on our community, on our economy and on our society overall. They should be using the information that is available to them now. In this place, we have had a lot of debate about the commercial-in-confidence process and whether or not it is appropriate. Mr Speaker, what the committee has said in its report is that we accept that that commercial-in-confidence information about the tenders and the various proposals is not available to the committee or indeed to this Assembly overall, however much we feel that perhaps it should be; but it is available to the Government. It is available to the Government's representatives on the tri-government working group that is assessing the proposals. Our representatives on that body should be ensuring that, when they look at the tenders and at the information that the tenders present, they make the judgment about which one is better for Canberra and which one is not so good for Canberra. They can be doing that now. I have not heard the Government say that they are doing that.

So, there are a number of recommendations in this report that highlight the need for the Government to do that. Specifically, Mr Speaker, they highlight the need for the Government to look at that commercial-in-confidence information when it looks at issues such as job displacement. Job displacement is a potential risk from the development of the very high speed train. There is the potential for employment in certain sectors of the economy to decrease, particularly in other associated transport fields which would be in competition with the very high speed train. We cannot assume that, with the development of a very high speed train, those jobs will automatically go from, say, the airline industry into the very high speed train industry. They will not do that miraculously. The Government needs to anticipate the potential shift in employment, the displacement in employment. They can be doing that now, based on the information that is available to them now on the travel time of the various proponents' models for trains and on other factors that are available to them in the commercial-in-confidence process. That is one recommendation, Mr Speaker.

Another very important recommendation is to do with the oversight of the potential social and economic impacts of the project. I was disappointed to learn from the evidence presented to the committee that the Government really has not done an enormous amount of work in this area. Again, there is the potential for them to do this, and there is the potential for them to be recommending and establishing now processes which ensure that the economic and social impacts on our city are monitored and predicted by our Government. To that end, there should be a social and economic unit established within the Chief Minister's Department to oversight that process. That is another very important recommendation of this committee's report.

Mr Speaker, a lot has been said about the ability of this project to bring jobs to Canberra. Some other big infrastructure projects around town, announced in the past year or so, we would have hoped would have brought jobs to Canberra. One of these infrastructure projects was the duplication of the Federal Highway around Lake George. Mr Speaker, we thought, "This is great. There will be opportunities for people in Canberra to go and work on this infrastructure project". What happened, in reality, was that the tender packages for that project - the opportunities for medium-sized Canberra firms to bid

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