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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (1 September) . . Page.. 1658 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

telecommunications or from the telecommunication environment. All sorts of things are in the terms of reference. They do cover 21/2 pages, but nowhere in these terms of reference does it say that the only outcome allowed is a sale. Mr Corbell's comment was that the consultants did the job they were asked to do. What they did, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, was follow the terms of reference because that was the basis of the contract with the Government.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired. I draw members' attention to the presence in the gallery of the Clerk of the New South Wales Legislative Council, Mr John Evans. I bid him a warm welcome on behalf of members.

MR KAINE (4.23): Forgetting the ideology which the Chief Minister referred to, I wonder which side of the house, if either, is acting on the basis of ideology. My problem with this report is that I found it totally unconvincing. On page 2, in its key recommendations, it says that the Government should not retain ownership of the TAB. Then it goes on and says, amongst other things, that an early sale is likely to maximise the value of the organisation, which sort of strengthens the proposition that it should be sold. Then, finally, it says that a sale process achieving the type of return to which they refer in an earlier dot point would provide the ACT Government with a substantial up-front payment. If that was not designed to say to the Government, "You should flog this off very quickly", then I do not know what else it could have been intending to say.

Unfortunately, when I got beyond page 2 and started reading the rest of the report, I discovered that I was not convinced that any one of those recommendations held good. For example, it has been bruited about that we have to sell this entity in a hurry because it is not making any money and the longer we keep it the less value it is going to have. Well, the first proposition that it is not making any money does not hold up. If you were to construct a set of accounts that remove from it the compulsory payments that the Government imposes on ACTTAB, to the racing industry, for example, including picking up the costs of litigation that the Government itself instigated, then you would discover that it had a pretty good bottom line. So the Chief Minister's argument that the organisation does not make any money does not hold up. It does make money, but by government decision the profits of the organisation are disbursed in certain ways before the net profit passes into the hands of the Government, and thereby the taxpayer.

The truth of what I am saying can be based on a couple of extracts from the report. On page 4 the consultants note that "the ACT remains a robust gambling market". It is not in decline. There is nothing wrong with the market in Canberra. It is not failing. It is a robust gambling market. The 1997 per capita gambling expenditure, we are told, was $758 in the ACT versus an Australia-wide total of $736. So the rate of gambling per capita here is higher than it is across the nation. That is despite an annual decline of 3.4 per cent and 6.6 per cent over the last two years versus a corresponding total Australia growth of 8.8 per cent and 2.8 per cent. The report says:

In fact, the ACT racing market defies national trends with two-year growth of 10.1 per cent and 0.6 per cent -v- total Australia rates of -0.8 per cent and -1.9 per cent.

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