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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (10 December) . . Page.. 4814 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Finally, Mr Speaker, the Chief Minister referred to some potential problem in Territory-owned corporations having the same requirements as government departments. If we look at the Annual Reports (Government Agencies) Act, it talks about the annual reports of chief executives and the annual reports of public authorities, which, of course, includes Territory-owned corporations, statutory officeholders and authorities, tribunals, commissions, councils, boards, et cetera. It seems to me that the Annual Reports Act already acknowledges the different reporting requirements of different types of instrumentalities, authorities and government organisations.

The Labor Party does not seek to annihilate those differences. What the Labor Party seeks to do is to ensure that, in coming under the purview of the Annual Reports (Government Agencies) Act, the Government has to set out in instruments which are tabled in this place what the reporting requirements are for different kinds of Territory instrumentalities, public authorities or government departments. In that way we are able to see what reporting requirements are allowed. We are able to debate them if we seek to debate them. It puts these things out in the open, rather than being left up to the judgment of individual boards and individual chief executives of particular Territory-owned corporations, or even of the shareholders of those corporations.

Mr Speaker, if we look at the annual reports that were presented to this parliament and scrutinised by the Estimates Committee this year, we see quite significant differences in the standard of reporting from different Territory-owned corporations. We got much fuller reporting from ACTEW than we did from Totalcare or ACTTAB. In the case of Totalcare, apart from their failure to comply with the requirements of the FOI Act and possibly the Public Interest Disclosure Act, the fact is that you would not have got much idea of what Totalcare had been doing with the taxpayers' $25m just from reading the annual report. If you did not have some general knowledge of what Totalcare was doing, you would be very hard pressed to figure it out from the report. You certainly were not given information in relation to a lot of matters considered by people in this place, and in the past, to be important public interest issues that ought to be considered, such as how the activities of the corporation impact on the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, or what they are doing about fraud prevention, or any of a number of other issues that are dealt with in other people's annual reports.

Mr Speaker, I think it is appropriate that Territory-owned corporations do make those kinds of reports. In the past it appeared to be good enough for ACTEW Corporation to make those kinds of reports. I think that to assist boards, as much as anything else, it would be appropriate for there to be formal guidelines under the Annual Reports (Government Agencies) Act in the future. That is why we are going down this path. I think it is a moderate and sensible amendment. There is plenty of scope for the Government to consider any kind of commercial concerns that they have and to deal with those concerns; but they will have to deal with them in an open way under the scrutiny of the Assembly, not in private discussions between them and members of the board, or them and the chief executive of the Territory-owned corporation.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Bill agreed to in principle.

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