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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 8 Hansard (28 October) . . Page.. 2365 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Speaker, first of all, I ask members to turn to the second page of this three-page handout. The second page shows a comparison between outages - that is, power losses - to people in Victoria during the six years preceding the beginning of privatisation and in the four years afterwards. Members will see very clearly from those figures that there was a marked reduction in every year in which privatisation was in train or in effect in Victoria over every other year when there was no privatisation in Victoria. For each year that Victorian power experienced some measure of privatisation, the level of outages was reduced, and, in consequence, you could say that the quality of service available to the people of Victoria was improved.

Mr Corbell cited figures yesterday in respect of 1996 and 1997 for outages which he purported to show was the experience of privatisation in other jurisdictions and by the use of those figures created the impression that outages increased in Victoria as a result of privatisation. Mr Speaker, the figures there are slightly different from the figures Mr Corbell quoted yesterday. Why, you ask, are the figures different? Well, first of all, the figures here are from the Electricity Supply Association of Australia. Secondly, the figures cited by Mr Corbell yesterday are probably figures from the same source but they are figures in respect of the calendar year whereas these figures, as you can see from the table, are figures in respect of the financial year ended 30 June. That, I think, accounts for the difference in the figures.

It has been suggested to me that the ESAA is not a reliable source of information, but I do not know whether that is the case or not. I am happy to rely on Mr Corbell's source for those figures and I will come back to those in a moment. This table shows a very clear comparison between the situation in Victoria prior to privatisation and the result afterwards. In every single year the level of outage is well below any given year in the preceding six years when the Government owned and operated power supplies in Victoria. In fact, it averages at about half the level of outage during the preceding six years. I put it to the Assembly that it is grossly misleading to cite a figure for just one or two years without looking at that larger picture of what happened over those eight to 10 years. It is grossly misleading, Mr Speaker.

Mr Corbell cited, as I said, the figures from the Regulator-General and he looked in particular at that slight rise between 1996 and 1997. As he said yesterday to the Assembly, there was a rise from 207 to 218 minutes, a rise of 11 minutes in Victoria on average, in the 1996 year over the 1995 year. I would ask members to look at the third page of this handout where they can see from a report of the Regulator-General - I am not sure that it is the most recent report, but it is one in the last couple of years - that paragraph 3.1.4 explains the reason for that slight increase in 1996. Mr Corbell said he was sourcing his comments from the Regulator-General's report, and here is what the Regulator-General said about those figures in 1996:

The 1996 figure is five per cent higher than the 1995 result due to storm activity in September 1996, as discussed below.

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