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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 11 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3183 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

It is a position supported by the Canberra Times. In its editorial on 31 May in response to the Chief Minister's tabling, the Canberra Times called the one-off funding option "reckless". According to the Canberra Times:

Attempting to clean the slate in one fell swoop is to use an unnecessarily large sledgehammer on a problem nut that can just as easily be cracked many different ways.

They concluded:

The most sensible solution is for the Government to plot a course somewhere between the two extremes.

That, of course, is precisely what the Chief Minister's Department was proceeding to do until this bright idea, this brainwave, came, this ideological fetish which the Chief Minister and the Liberals have, simply to sell off ACTEW and then scrabble around looking for some justification for it. It is, of course, also the position that has been adopted in other jurisdictions. Nobody else in Australia has felt the need to adopt this panic position of the Government, the fact that they have gone weak at the knees, got the wobbles, feel that it is a problem that they cannot handle.

Nobody else in Australia has adopted that attitude. That is, of course, what Labor has been arguing all along in this case. It is an issue that is difficult, that does need some concentrated attention, but it is an issue that we have been dealing with. The Chief Minister's Department in its annual report this year indicates to the people of Canberra that it is an issue in relation to which significant progress has been made. There is no need to inextricably link the two, as the Chief Minister and others seem determined to do. It is the Chief Minister who continues to want to sell the house to pay the mortgage, who wants to sell the farm to fix the fences, and it is the Chief Minister who is choosing to ignore the community that has queued to sign petitions against the sale of its largest asset. It is the Chief Minister who chooses to ignore the people of Canberra, who, I am sure she knows, do not want ACTEW sold.

The most recent polling done on this issue, a Datacol poll by the Canberra Times, indicated that over 70 per cent of the people of Canberra were opposed to the sale of the electricity arm and over 80 per cent of the people of Canberra do not want to see us dispose of our water and sewerage utilities. It is the Chief Minister who talks down our capacity to deal with these difficult problems. It is the Chief Minister who keeps suggesting implicitly that the Territory will go broke if we do not sell ACTEW to pay off the superannuation liability. It is now the Chief Minister who seeks to ignore the wishes of this Assembly.

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