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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4990 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

which I believe works better than any other parliament in Australia and better than any other council that I have been able to observe - and I have observed quite a number of them - we have a much more effective system of dealing with such issues and ensuring that the Assembly as a whole maintains a watching brief.

Mr Speaker, this is an important matter because it goes to the very basis of each and every individual member of our community paying a fair price for their electricity and a fair price for their water. Therefore, this is a worthwhile exercise. We have to get it right, and that is why I draw this matter to members' attention and seek support for both parts of my motion.

MR KAINE (Minister for Urban Services) (5.49): I must say that I am a little surprised that Mr Moore and Mr Osborne would look through a disallowable instrument with my name on it and immediately assume that somehow I am being devious and trying to slip one through. I think those were the words that Mr Moore used. I think Mr Moore knows me well enough after all the years to know that I am not a devious person and that that is not a game I play. All that this instrument intended to do was to empower our prices commissioner to look at prices, and I believed that it was necessary for him to do that beyond the immediate next financial year. There are a couple of very good reasons why it is necessary for the commissioner to do that. We are moving into a period of some uncertainty and risk, particularly in electrical energy supply, with the opening up of the market, with other providers coming into the market and with ACTEW having to compete and guarantee to supply those people resident in the ACT who want to continue to buy their electrical energy through ACTEW. Unless we look further ahead than the next year, there will remain a good deal of uncertainty as to just what happens beyond June 1999. I do not think that we should leave our consumers with that feeling of uncertainty as to whether they are going to be guaranteed supply and, if so, at what price.

All this was intended to do was to have the commissioner undertake a study in two parts. First of all, we need to know fairly quickly what the pricing regime recommended by the commissioner for the next financial year is going to be, because the Government and ACTEW have to act upon that. The aim is to have the final report on the table by May of next year, and an interim report a couple of months before that so that we can get a feel for which way the commissioner is going and know before we get to 1 July next year what pricing regime is going to apply for the following year. We could have asked him to report on the whole period, right through to the year 2001, by May next year, but I think logic would tell you that it would have been placing an impossible task on the commissioner to have asked him to report for a four-year period by that date; so we broke the task up into two parts. We gave him until 15 May to complete the first part and until 15 October next year to complete the second part. There is nothing devious in that. It is merely asking the commissioner to do the job in two parts in such a way that he is capable of complying with the requirement. If the Assembly chooses to delete the second date it will leave the commissioner free to report whenever he feels like it. I would think that we would want to set a reporting date that is reasonable so that we get the information as to what the commissioner intends to recommend as early as we possibly can rather than at some time beyond that. I am uncertain what the objective is in trying to remove that reporting date.

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