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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (16 February) . . Page.. 106 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

reform is critical to proper decisions, the Review should in its opening sections contain a clear statement of the legal opinion on which the rest of the Review is based. As it stands the legal situation is confused.

It is of major concern to me that in the debate we have had in the community over a range of issues we have used the spectre of national competition policy and our responsibilities under it to justify government decisions. I know that members opposite will blush every time they think of the spurious way national competition policy was used to justify not keeping the decision to build the Belconnen pool. It really does traduce national competition policy and the debate we have in relation to these very significant issues that governments use competition policy principles to allow significant electoral promises, such as the Belconnen pool, simply to be trashed out of convenience but supposedly in relation to the application of those rules.

A similar process was adopted in relation to the milk industry question. The Competition Policy Forum deals with that by saying that the review appeared to misunderstand. We have in relation to the Belconnen pool not just an apparent misunderstanding but an absolutely cynical application of so-called rules to that decision. We can be more generous in relation to this one, and I think the Competition Policy Forum was when it said that the Sheen review appears to have misunderstood the competition policy arrangements with respect to the role of public benefit. It said:

The Review seems to be based on the belief that all anti-competitive practices are contrary to the CPA -

competitive policy arrangements -

Anti-competitive practices are not illegal under the CPA. They are only contrary ... if it is determined that the public benefits of the anti-competitive practices are inadequate to justify continuation of the practices.

The next part is vital and it should be regarded in the context of the debate we are having:

The purpose of the Review -

it is a review which this Government relied on almost exclusively -

was to determine whether the public benefits of the existing arrangements are adequate to justify their continuation.

The report goes into some detail on the public interest test, and this is vital to all our considerations in relation to the application of national competition principles. We must have regard to the public interest test. In a late lament Mr Acworth, in delivering this report, says:

The Forum expected the core of the Review to be a careful and detailed assessment of the impacts of proposed changes on each of these potential public benefits. The Review claims that: "The benefits to the

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