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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (2 February) . . Page.. 45 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

The risk in the strategy that the Government adopted is, of course, that a rigorous examination proves the exaggeration, as the Australia Institute's report demonstrates. The institute has shown that, if correct accounting methodology is used, ACTEW's valuation is substantially higher than that suggested by the Government, and thus the loss to the community through privatisation of the corporation, given the assumption of the eventual sale price of ABN AMRO of about $1 billion, is in the order of $700m. The Government has not been able to explain - indeed it has not even bothered to try - the fiscal responsibility of that position.

This selective use of figures is a characteristic of this Government's modus operandi. We saw the pattern set perhaps a year ago, in the first days of this Assembly, when the Chief Minister grossly overstated private sector jobs growth in the ACT to win a headline in the Canberra Times. She was caught out then compounding the mistake in this chamber, and she has been caught out again in this debate. She has been caught out again and again.

Mr Speaker, the history of privatisation is the history of redundancy. The history of utility privatisation and corporatisation indicates that cost efficiencies are primarily sought through the reduction in staff. That is not arguable. There is a raft of evidence that shows that Australia's combined electricity, water and gas supply industries had the vastly highest ratio of retrenched workers of any industry in Australia. It is quite obvious, despite the protestations of the Chief Minister that any sale contract would include a requirement for a private owner to retain ACTEW staff for a period of time, that jobs will eventually go.

The Government, after all, is looking at a trade sale. ACTEW will be sold to another player in the game, with its own head office, its own corporate staff, its own sales staff. Duplication of staff cuts into profit. It is not part of the private sector's operations. Administrative jobs at ACTEW must and will go. So will trades jobs, as experience elsewhere in the utilities industry tells us. Esso Australia, a major player in the gas supply industry, has taken a leaf from the book of the Chief Minister's Federal colleagues. It has been vigorously downsizing. Research figures reported by Professor Craig Littler, a visiting professor at the Queensland University of Technology, show that across Australia Esso shed more than 50 per cent of its national work force in the last seven years. But the alarming part of the story is that the number of trades staff, the people who undertake the safety and maintenance operations, has fallen 36 per cent in six years. As Professor Littler wrote, "These are large amputations indeed".

After the relentless attack by the Commonwealth Government on Canberra since 1996, how could the ACT afford any more sizeable job losses, or the indirect effects of these losses on community infrastructure on which we all depend? In the course of this debate the Government, in explaining the effect of job cuts, has used a downstream multiplier that puts a grim focus on the Commonwealth's attack on Canberra and that emphasises the potential impact of yet more cuts from the privatised ACTEW. For every ACTEW job lost, we can add another 0.8 per cent of a job lost elsewhere in the ACT economy, possibly in the hundreds of small businesses that currently provide services to ACTEW.

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