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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 1 Hansard (29 April) . . Page.. 173 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, we have, as I said, an important decision to make. We cannot put that off. We cannot ignore it. To say that ACTEW has been good for the ACT, has profited the ACT community in the past, is not good enough anymore. That historical contribution in the ACT by ACTEW and other corporations like Totalcare and ACTTAB is acknowledged. It is very clear. But we simply cannot assume that the dollars flowing into the public coffers and the employment bases that those bodies offer to the ACT community will remain indefinitely in the changing marketplace.

Look at ACTTAB. ACTTAB is fast becoming, at this stage, the only publicly-owned and retained betting corporation in the whole of Australia - the only one, the last one. In a new environment of contestability of services like betting, and now of other services as well such as electricity supply, how do you expect us to sustain the value of that asset, its dividend to the community and its employment base without making some changes to its operating position? If we do not make the changes that have been talked about in reports like this, what changes do we make?

Mr Speaker, on the weekend Mr Corbell made some very foolish statements about entrenching provisions that prevented future Territory Assemblies from corporatising or privatising bodies like this. Mr Corbell obviously failed to examine section 26 of the self-government Act, which says in subsection (2):

The entrenching law -

and that is what it is -

shall be submitted to a referendum of the electors of the Territory as provided by enactment.

He did not think about that, I do not think. He has not suggested a referendum on the subject. He also, of course, to entrench a provision, needs to have the same special majority that he seeks to provide for future decisions on these sorts of matters. So, he needs to have two-thirds of the Assembly agreeing to entrench two-thirds majorities for future Assemblies' decisions on those subjects. The foolishness, with great respect, of his position, shooting first and asking questions later - it was probably a weekend special, I suppose, to get a bit of publicity - was well and truly debunked in an editorial in the Canberra Times yesterday.

Mr Speaker, we need more careful thought than what was exhibited by those foolish statements by Mr Corbell. We need a considered position. We need a strategy. We need to be prepared to be flexible. The Government is indicating that. It has no choice but to do that; we are committed to that course of action both by commonsense and by the agreements and commitments made on the Territory's behalf by the Follett Labor Government in 1994. We are committed to those things. It is time, Mr Speaker, that other parties in the Assembly acknowledged that, without a similar flexibility on their part, the Territory's assets could be very severely threatened and things like jobs could be at risk.

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