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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 8 Hansard (29 October) . . Page.. 2421 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

(3) the Committee report by the first sitting day of June 1999 and that the Government take no action in relation to the sale of ACTEW until the Assembly has considered the report; and

(4) the foregoing provisions of this resolution have effect notwithstanding anything contained in the standing orders.

I have put up this motion to establish a select committee because it worries me greatly that the Government is expecting this Assembly to make a decision affecting a billion dollars of the ACT people's assets - perhaps the biggest decision this Assembly will make - by the end of this year, based on a couple of consultants' reports it has commissioned. This Assembly regularly sends lesser Bills and motions to committees so that members have the opportunity to thoroughly examine the details and to give the community the chance to have their say on the issue. Surely the issue of the privatisation of the ACT's major asset deserves similar treatment.

The Government has implied during the debate so far on the privatisation of ACTEW that it has worked through all the issues relating to ACTEW's operations and the state of the ACT's finances and has come up with what it thinks is the only answer - that it must privatise ACTEW. The Government is asking the rest of the Assembly to trust it; that it knows best for the future of ACTEW. However, I do not think that the Government has yet proved its case to the Assembly. I for one am certainly not prepared to vote on this issue without all sides of the issue being fully canvassed both inside and outside the Assembly, and I would hope that the other non-government members would take the same approach to this important issue.

Mr Speaker, my terms of reference focus on the social, environmental and economic impacts of the proposed privatisation of ACTEW as well as the potential privatisation of other government services and organisations. While the focus of attention at this point of time is obviously ACTEW, I think it is important that this committee not be constrained from looking at the privatisation issue in its broadest sense across the public sector.

Not only has the Government already proposed the privatisation of ACTTAB and threatened ACTION, but the other Territory-owned corporation, Totalcare, must surely be in the Government's sights for privatisation if the ACTEW sale does proceed. The Government's refusal to rule out the privatisation of Canberra Hospital is also a major worry. In fact, the whole purchaser-provider model implemented by the Government across the public sector has as its logical conclusion the privatisation or at least the outsourcing of the provider side, so we could be seeing a procession of privatisation proposals coming from this Government over this term if the Assembly does not put the ACTEW sale proposal under intense scrutiny now.

The terms of reference I have proposed for this select committee are really designed to address the issues that have not been adequately covered by the studies undertaken by the Government so far into the future of ACTEW. The Government's studies have taken a narrow approach of primarily looking at the financial value of ACTEW, but the future of ACTEW has much broader implications to the ACT community.

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