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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (2 February) . . Page.. 8 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Economics is concerned with producing the maximum amount of benefit with the least resources ... ACTEW in private ownership will aim to use the least possible resources, including labour, whilst maintaining output.

That does sound like Mr Wearing, but then Mr Hird moves in the same circles, so maybe that is fine. This economic approach is being widely challenged throughout Australia and internationally as well. This sort of economic policy is not taking into account employment and the broader public interest. The downside of such an approach is becoming more and more evident as the Federal Government pursues its agenda of so-called economic reform, and we are seeing increasing unemployment and social fragmentation that results from it. The dissenting comments also say this:

There is no economic benefit in having two people do a job where one will do.

I do not see anywhere that that claim has been made in the report. Obviously there are other considerations, such as whether the job requires more than one person to do it well; issues of quality; whether in fact standards will be maintained and even improved; whether the conditions of employment meet reasonable industrial standards; whether the profit motive of the private sector will compromise this; and whether the employment will be moved from our local region. These issues matter. We can no longer accept these bland statements, such as the one made by Mr Hird in that dissenting comment.

We are told by the Government that such things can be assured through contracts. This is from the same Government which assured us there would be no job losses when ACTEW was corporatised. This is at the same time that we see an energy bulletin produced by a legal firm rejoicing in the fact that a sale of ACTEW would be a first in Australia because it is a complete water-power package, and I quote:

This means that the sale transactions will not be bound by past practice. Experienced bidders will no doubt welcome the opportunity to step outside the usual framework of a privatisation and to negotiate their way through the proposed regulatory structure so as to tailor it more closely to their needs.

It is not surprising, Mr Speaker, that we are all a little bit sceptical.

Another quite amazing comment in the dissenting report is the claim that the committee has had plenty of time to do this inquiry. This is particularly curious considering that the day before - members can see this recorded in the minutes - Mr Hird was demanding that we not table the report at all because there had not been enough time to do the work. He obviously changed his mind. The timeframe did put tremendous pressure on the committee, and I also would like to acknowledge the work done by Bill Symington and Beth Irvin. I would like to acknowledge the work done by Ted Quinlan and his staff, who put in many, many hours, and I also thank the other members of the committee.

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