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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 3 Hansard (26 May) . . Page.. 579 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The Competition Policy Forum, which has been the subject of great debate in the past few weeks following the Belconnen pool fiasco, was also a recommendation of that report. When the Government ignored most of the recommendations of the report, I moved a motion in this Assembly for that forum to be established. The Government spoke against that motion. Mr De Domenico posed the question:

How can exposing government businesses to fair competition disadvantage the community?

He continued:

It does the opposite. It ensures that valuable government resources are not used to prop up inefficient bureaucracies and to hamper the growth and development of business in the city.

These comments highlight the very problem with taking a general philosophy like "competition is good" and applying it generally to government activities. Government is not a business. There are much broader issues that must be taken into account besides efficiency, which brings me to the crucial issue of public benefit.

A central element of competition policy is public benefit. When the Hilmer reforms were being implemented at the Federal level, social justice and environment groups fought a long and hard battle against the move to turn government into a business. The major concession that was gained was the capacity for exemptions from competition policy to be gained through recourse to the public benefit. Subclause 1(3) of the competition principles agreement sets out the public benefit criteria. Environmental sustainability, social welfare and equity considerations, occupational health and safety, and the interests of consumers are included in the list of public benefit factors. The ACT Government have stated in their progress report on the implementation of competition policy that they support a transparent process for assessing the public benefit. Unfortunately, most of the reforms of the ACT Government being conducted in the name of competition policy are far from transparent.

The Belconnen pool project is a classic example of a process used for working out the public interest that was far from transparent. This issue also provides us with perhaps the most public example of the application of the principle of competitive neutrality to public sector activities. I note from the report prepared by the complaints unit on that issue that, although the competitive principles agreement requires that the competitive neutrality principles apply to significant government business activities, the Government has determined that in the ACT there is a benefit in applying the principles to all government-owned businesses and business activities, rather than restricting the application to significant businesses.

In question time, I asked the Chief Minister about how that decision was made and, while initially she denied that that was the policy, I understood that she actually corrected that statement after question time. I seek leave to table two documents - one from the ACT Competitive Neutrality Complaints Unit, which clearly states that it is Government policy, and page 3 of the competitive neutrality in the ACT document produced by the

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