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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 7 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 2164 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

ACT Housing has a $2m per annum contract with Ecowise due to expire in December of this year, just three months away. DUS Traffic has an $800,000 contract due to expire in June of next year. The Yass Shire Council also has an $80,000 contract due to expire in June of next year and Totalcare Industries has a $50,000 contract due to expire in December of this year. A number of those contracts have, effectively, some options on them but are all due to go out to the marketplace at various stages from the beginning of next year. Mr Speaker, those contracts represent work for approximately 20 tradespeople and four administrative staff of Ecowise and they represent value in work of, as I have indicated, well over $2m. In other words, those 24 jobs almost certainly would be lost if Ecowise were not able to secure the continuation of those contracts. They would certainly be under serious risk.

Mr Speaker, let us ask ourselves: How do we secure those jobs through those contracts? Do we do it by maintaining the present structures which tie Ecowise into a range of public sector conditions and overheads or do we free it to pursue a more commercial approach to the pursuit of those contracts and allow the initiative of the employees, who under this proposal would become the owners of Ecowise, to drive the fortunes and the futures of Ecowise? Mr Speaker, you only need to look at this matter for a very brief time to realise that it makes sense for Ecowise employees to be masters of their destiny and to be able to consider how they can best position Ecowise to successfully secure those contracts. They are the best people to do that - not managers of ACTEW with much larger portfolios to look after, with many other considerations at stake here, with dividends to government and all sorts of other concerns to be worried about. It is these people themselves, the workers in this enterprise, who are in the best position to be able to construct the future of Ecowise to be profitable, to remain profitable, to stave off the challenges to Ecowise's profitability in the future, and to secure the continuation of those jobs.

Mr Speaker, we would be mad to knock back the initiative shown by these workers, by these employees, and reject the request for them to purchase this enterprise today. The future of Ecowise is not assured under the current scenario. No scenario, of course, in the present climate makes any enterprise absolutely secure. (Extension of time granted) No action makes any enterprise in a market like the one facing Australia today entirely secure. But the capacity to respond to changes in the marketplace is essential to secure the future of a business, and that is what we are seeking to do today by putting this motion forward.

Let me correct a quite false statement put forward by Mr Corbell in his remarks. The Government has not initiated this sale. It was initiated by the workers of Ecowise.

Mr Quinlan: That would be right!

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Quinlan doubts that statement. You can walk up to the people who are sitting in the gallery today and ask them what they think about the veracity of that statement. I would like you to do that, because those people have shown initiative in wanting to make sure that their jobs and their future are secure under these new arrangements and they deserve to be supported in that. We have been accused in this place time and again of being ideologues on the question of privatisation.

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