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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4800 ..

Mr Berry: I did not say that at all. I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. Mrs Carnell is misleading this Assembly if she says that. If you check the Hansard, you will see that I did not say that.

MR SPEAKER: I am in no position to check Hansard at the moment.

Mr Berry: I did not say that, and you know it.

MRS CARNELL: What did you say?

Mr Berry: I said that you switched the debt from the TAB directly to the taxpayer. That is what I said.

MRS CARNELL: If you switch a debt from one entity that is the taxpayer to another entity that is the taxpayer, you do not switch it anywhere. Mr Berry could say, as he did a minute ago, that by the time we switched the debt the TAB was a corporation and therefore we did swap it from a corporation, and a corporation's debt is not necessarily a debt of the taxpayer. Mr Speaker, those opposite have been arguing ever since we brought down the last budget that an ACTEW debt is the same as government borrowings. Heavens! Can I please have some consistency from those opposite? They argued very strongly that a debt that ACTEW might enter into was exactly the same as a debt of the taxpayer. Now they are saying that it is not the same. Mr Speaker, I do not think we can ask for much in this place from those opposite, except a tiny bit of consistency.

I recap very quickly on the differences between these two issues. One has no illegality; the other is fraud. In one case, VITAB, it cost us $5.3m. In the other case it did not cost the taxpayer one dollar but potentially made the taxpayer some extra dollars. On one side a Minister refused to act and ended up losing the link between the two TABs. On the other side I acted immediately and got a new three-year contract for the TAB. On one side a Minister refused to respond to warnings. On the other side we acted immediately. On one side you have an ex-Minister who was totally inconsistent, and is still inconsistent today. On the other side we understand that any debt that the ACT picks up by any entity of the Government is at the end of the day a debt that we are responsible for. I do not believe that we can say that there are debts that any Territory-owned corporation or statutory authority enters into that we are not at the end of the day responsible for. Of course we are.

Without getting into the politics of this, which I am not doing at this stage, I am just asking whether we could please get from Mr Berry some sort of balance in these two situations. Mr Berry did cover up. He pretended that it was not a problem, and now we are $5m poorer. I accept that he said he was sorry that we are $5m poorer, but when you actually look at this Mr Berry has not shown an understanding of the difference between incentives paid to two big punters in the ACT, which I think were totally unacceptable and which were stopped, and an offshore betting operation that Burbidge has said was fraud.

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