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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4992 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

While I can understand that Mr Moore might look at some of these with some suspicion, I can assure him and Mr Osborne that the intention was merely to make sure that all of the serious ramifications of pricing were in fact taken into account by the commissioner. If we are not going to ask him to do that, what are we going to ask him to do? Are we going to ask him to do a half-baked job and come back with some half-baked policy on pricing that, under closer analysis, proves to have left out some very vital matters that are of great interest to the end consumer and what they pay for the services they get?

I very much suspect that if the Assembly deletes these matters from the commissioner's terms of reference he will probably look at most of them anyway, whether we state them or whether we do not. If he did so, he would be acting very prudently. Why would the people in this chamber not want him to act prudently? Why would we exclude from the purview of the commissioner matters that could well be very significant in the consideration of the pricing outcomes? I do not understand why we would want to do that.

I come back to the point that I made at the beginning. Section 20 subsection (2) includes some specific matters that the Assembly wanted the commissioner to deal with but it does not preclude the commissioner from dealing with other matters as well. If we thought that those were the only matters that should be dealt with, then we should have said on the bottom, "And you will consider no other matters". That would have been imprudent and it would have confined the commissioner in ways which I think are unnecessary, unproductive and not necessarily in the interests of the principle that Mr Moore enunciated, of arriving at fair and equitable prices for ACTEW's customers for the commodities that they buy from ACTEW.

Mr Speaker, there is nothing devious about these terms of reference. They were put in place to get a response at the earliest possible time. We could not afford to wait until after next March to ask the commissioner to take on the establishment of a pricing regime starting on 1 July. That it is going through the Assembly now is merely to enable the commissioner to get on with the job while the rest of us have a holiday or maybe even prosecute an election, whichever you find more enjoyable. I will get a lot of fun out of prosecuting the election. I do not know about you, Mr Whitecross. You probably will, too.

There is nothing devious about it. There is nothing hidden. There are no ulterior motives. It is simply a matter of enabling the commissioner to get on with the job and seeking that he examine all matters of relevance to the question of pricing, not only those we happen to specify in the Act. I simply say to members of the Assembly: Delete them by all means, but I do not think it is going to add anything to the terms of reference. I do not think it is going to clarify what we are asking the commissioner to do. I cannot see how it is going to improve the product at the end of the day.

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