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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 8 Hansard (28 October) . . Page.. 2364 ..

Mr Wood: Always political, Gary. Why don't you acknowledge it? It is always political, and who has the numbers? It is as simple as that.

MR SPEAKER: Order, please! This is a serious motion.

Mr Wood: No, he is not making it serious.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Wood, if you do not believe it is serious, I suggest that you leave.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, it is a serious matter and in the past at least three Ministers in this Government have been in the position of apologising to the chamber for their failure to properly inform the Assembly because they had, on their own admission, misled the Assembly. Mr Speaker, I argue today that Mr Corbell has quite egregiously misled the Assembly and if he will not withdraw and apologise for his comments he should be censured for that.

So that members do not have to rely on information which might not be at their fingertips, I want to circulate some information to members of this place concerning the matter about which I am now speaking. I will table that information and I ask that it be circulated in the chamber.

Mr Speaker, yesterday Mr Corbell, in the matter of public importance, made a number of points about privatisation. In particular, he quoted the example of other jurisdictions concerning privatisation and said:

Let us look at what privatisation has meant in other jurisdictions and I will cite two clear examples. The first, Mr Speaker, is in relation to Victoria.

I am reading from pages 76 and 77 of Hansard. He then went on to talk about, supposedly, the experience in Victoria as a result of privatisation. I am reading from the top of page 77. He said:

The Office of the Regulator-General, which is the regulatory body in Victoria, has outlined the fact that the average time off supply, that is power failures or outages, per customer, per year in Victoria has increased from 207 minutes in 1995 to 218 minutes.

Mr Speaker, the facts as outlined by Mr Corbell in that one sentence are perfectly true. I take no issue at all with the facts as outlined in that one sentence.

Mr Smyth: Except it was 203.

Mr Moore: He said it was 203, not 207.

MR HUMPHRIES: Not necessarily. No, that is not necessarily the case. There are different sets of figures and I will come back to that. I do not wish to quibble in this place with the figures put on the table by Mr Corbell in that respect, but the impression he created by citing those figures, highly selectively, from the Regulator-General's report grossly misleads this Assembly. That information is available in the handout which is now being distributed in this place.

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