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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3182 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

It is a challenge. It is not an easy decision, but is one that we have to face. It is one, of course, which we were prepared to face and which the Chief Minister's Department was dealing with, in its own terms, adequately, as reported in its annual report. But there we have the nub of it - the Chief Minister indicating when she tabled the Towers Perrin report that we must look for a proper balance between paying now or paying later.

It is interesting that the unfunded superannuation liability has become the bogey, the only reason now for selling ACTEW, a reason that is actually advanced at the expense of any of the downstream economic implications of the sale of ACTEW. That is irrelevant. We do not need to know what is the potential impact on the ACT economy of selling our largest asset. We are told that we do not need to know that; do not worry about those economic impacts. Do not worry about the jobs; do not worry that international and other national experience indicates that most or a significant proportion of those employees of ACTEW now will not be there once it is sold; they simply will not be there and nor will the jobs. Everybody here knows that if ACTEW is sold the top third of the jobs will go. They will go to wherever it is that the buyers have their headquarters. We all know that. We know that any proposal to sell is kissing goodbye to 300, 400 or more jobs. Yet we do not need to inquire into that. We need no investigation of that. We were actually vetoed - not only the Assembly, but also the people of Canberra.

It is interesting when one looks at the Towers Perrin report to note that they actually advanced six options. It is also of great concern to me that at no stage has the Government ever sought to respond to the Towers Perrin report. We have never seen a detailed or rigorous analysis of each of the six options and why one is to be advantaged over the other. There are six options. There has been no debate, no government response, and no assessment of the implications of each of the six, just this latter-day, convenient embracement of the sale of ACTEW to meet one of the possible options. The others get no guernsey. They get no discussion. There is no rationalisation.

The Chief Minister's desperation in relation to this issue is illustrated incredibly starkly by her fulminations yesterday or her embracement of the KPMG-Bankers Trust report which purports, in the Chief Minister's words, to show additional support for the need to sell ACTEW. It does no such thing, of course. It is the same typical gilding of the lily that we have come to expect from the Chief Minister in relation to this debate, actually putting a spin on things that simply are not substantiated. If one looks at the report one will see that it actually repeats in almost the same words the suggestions made by the Chief Minister when she tabled the Towers Perrin report, that is, that what we want here is a balance. We want a balance between the long-term and the short-term imperatives.

We do not need to rush in and use the sledgehammer of the privatisation of ACTEW to crack the nut that is the difficulty with the superannuation liability. Despite the Chief Minister's selective quoting, as I just said, KPMG-BT concluded - and this is, perhaps, the most significant of the findings in the report from KPMG-BT which the Chief Minister was quoting yesterday:

Some balance is needed between long term cost savings and increased short term outlays.

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