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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 4 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 1035 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

One of the vital elements of this Bill, of course, is the establishment of the gas technical regulator. We should note that it will be the expertise of the person so appointed which will be critical in ensuring that we receive good technical advice about any changes to the standards or the codes. The gas technical regulator that we appoint will be the person on whom we can rely for good information because, with any motion to disallow a varied or amended standard or code, members of this place will need to know what that motion is about so that we can understand it before we determine whether we wish to disallow it or not. So we will need some commitment from the Minister in connection with the gas technical regulator that persons appointed to that office will always have the highest technical qualifications - they will not be just administrative appointments of some public servant who has done a good job somewhere. It needs to be somebody with high technical qualifications in the area and with wide experience in the gas industry, so that we know the advice that we are getting from such a person is of the highest order.

In addition, I would ask the Minister to ensure in future that, when the Assembly has an opportunity to disallow a motion in connection with any technical matter, the advice of the gas technical regulator is provided to this place before the disallowance period expires, so that we can make a reasoned and informed judgment about whether the proposal should be disallowed or not. Since they will generally be matters of a technical nature, probably most members of this Assembly would not be qualified to make a judgment without technical advice. I ask the Minister to take both of those matters on notice and to make sure that we are properly informed so that we can do our duty after having been fully informed as to the ramifications.

The Minister has submitted a number of amendments to his legislation and they confer significant powers under the access Bill, as I have said, on an authority which is not appointed by this Assembly. The ACCC will have power to regulate charges for the use of transmission and distribution pipelines. The Minister justifies this, of course, by reference to the ACCC's present expertise in regulating transmission pipelines and its proposed acquisition over the next three years of expertise in regulating distribution pipelines. It may be valid or it may not.

Increased charges approved by the ACCC, of course, will flow on to ACT gas consumers. It is just another aspect in which control of our affairs and satisfying our constituency has been removed and the control has been handed on to somebody else. More importantly, though, by removing gas prices from the purview of the ACT Independent Pricing and Regulatory Commission, the Bill puts that matter totally beyond the control of this Assembly. The power will now reside in a Commonwealth authority and we will not even have our own ACT Independent Pricing and Regulatory Commission making any observation about them.

Another matter in connection with the Minister's amendments, Mr Speaker, is that his draft explanatory memorandum comments on the "need to define the powers and functions of the IPRC to those conferred y the gas pipeline access legislation". I am not too sure what those words mean. I wonder whether the Minister in his explanatory memorandum meant to say that there was a need to "confine", not "define".

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