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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (1 September) . . Page.. 1673 ..

Ms Carnell: It was the only choice. There were no other sports outside Sydney.

MR QUINLAN: There is a sport like hockey where you could have pre-Olympic tournaments and Canberrans could actually see - - -

Ms Carnell: Which we are having. It is happening.

MR QUINLAN: You have all of them? All that they want?

Ms Carnell: It is organised. Yes, I think so.

MR QUINLAN: We have not been told that.

Ms Carnell: I am sorry. We had better put out a press release.

MR QUINLAN: Yes. Keep the propaganda out of it, will you? It is important to get beyond the shield of saying, "Well, it is 2000 and it is all good". It is; nevertheless, we still want a rational approach to it. I, for one, would like to see a composite statement of what we are spending in that regard as opposed to community services, education and health - those other priorities that must necessarily suffer if we do have the capacity to find that money. That is one area that I would have liked to have been clearer in the Chief Minister's budget. There is quite obvious concern within this appropriation in relation to the Institute of the Arts, and I will not belabour that again. Others might want to, but I will not at this stage.

To a large extent, the centrepiece of the budget was the $100m sale of streetlighting to ACTEW. I have found the information provided on how that has been handled to be well and truly an insult to the intelligence. The particular transaction was heralded in the budget last year. It was going to happen this year. We have a sale and we have asked questions about it in this place. We were informed that the ACTEW board and ACTEW executives were delighted with the deal. It is just beyond belief that they would be delighted with such a deal. Elsewhere in the operations area of the budget you will find the figure showing how much ACTEW will receive for operating the streetlighting system. The number is, in fact, less than the number they received in the last financial year. So they have the potential to fork out $100m - the capital costs of forking out that $100m - for the privilege of having the amount they receive in return reduced. It is an insult to one's intelligence to believe that anybody would be delighted with a deal such as that. In the end, at the estimates it was said, "Well, we are going to do it on 30 June next year. They will not be operating it until then, so it is quite okay". Now, this was heralded a year ago. I am not convinced that the end line that we received at estimates had not more or less evolved than been a function of a direct plan. On our side there was a little concern over a couple of other items of expenditure and capital expenditure. As those have been discussed previously in this place, I will close on that point.

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