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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4959 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

They are definitely the words of somebody without a preconceived view! We have also seen his lack of economic acumen more than once. On the one hand, he is prepared to spend $44m of non-existent government funds supposedly to create employment and roads in the ACT. On the other hand, he is prepared to scuttle the development of a private hospital which represents a $25m capital injection with an annual turnover of $15m. A large part of this will be for increased employment in the ACT.

In another extraordinary twist, Mr Berry has allied himself with John James Memorial Hospital, to the extent of attaching the hospital's submission to the report. Of the 17 submissions received, John James gets pride of place in being attached, I presume in full, even before the minority report of the Government member of the committee. The Government member, Harold Hird, had the guts to submit a minority report. I understand that he found the chair completely intractable and was unable to effect more than a few cosmetic changes. The Government fully supports Mr Hird's minority report. The committee was a beat-up from the beginning. As we get closer to 21 February, I assume we will see more of the same.

In respect of the recommendations of the committee's majority report, the Government makes the following response. Recommendation 1 asks for the establishment of another inquiry to monitor the impact of a 100-bed hospital on the public and private sectors. I thought that was what the committee was supposed to do. We certainly gave them pages and pages of information on service and bed number projections in our submission, which on my reading of the report it chose to totally ignore.

Recommendation 2 asks that the Assembly request the Public Accounts Committee to examine the principle of commercial-in-confidence. The Government supports the intent of this recommendation, in that much of the contracting between the ACT Government and the private sector is on a commercial-in-confidence basis. Without this security, business may be reluctant to deal with the ACT Government, as Mr Berry himself has said - I quoted him earlier today - especially if there is a risk of commercially confidential information becoming available to competitors through public disclosure. As such, the Government proposes that this issue be considered by the next Assembly, by all MLAs rather than through a committee process. However, if the Assembly chooses to refer this matter to a committee in the next Assembly, we will support that approach. As I mentioned when the committee's report was tabled in November, I note with some wry amusement the intransigence that Mr Berry displayed three years ago when we asked him for the VITAB papers. He hid behind the commercial-in-confidence principle and cost the taxpayer some $5m. I will be interested to hear his comments on commercial-in-confidence if the next Assembly is graced by his presence. As I said earlier, we have referred the issue of commercial-in-confidence to the Chief Minister's Department to come forward with proposals which will go to the next Assembly. I believe very strongly that we do need to reduce the amount of commercial-in-confidence that is used by governments. I think at times it has been an excuse that has been used not to make papers available. We do have to sort this one out, and the next Assembly would be the time to do it.

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