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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 4 Hansard (20 April) . . Page.. 1007 ..

ACTEW ... This is putting it the wrong way around on two counts. First, ACTEW should be freed of the constraints of public ownership so it can compete effectively and maintain ACT employment. Secondly, businesses operating in the ACT should ensure they get all their business inputs as cheaply as possible so they remain competitive in business and employing people in the ACT.

Of course, that makes a lot of sense. What is the point of paying more for electricity because you are loyal to ACTEW when someone across the border is paying less for the same sorts of inputs and therefore providing a better chance to continue employment and be competitive at the same time? It makes no sense whatsoever.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I ask members to be open-minded about this process. We have a difficult process ahead of us. If members opposite have decided already that they do not like this particular option, so be it. I hope others in this place are prepared to give the Government the leeway to come back to this place with an option. Members have said that they want public ownership. Fine. We will produce an option, I hope, through this exercise of a working party which contains public ownership as a central plank of its operation, and we will see how we can deal with ACTEW's problems. But if you are not prepared to acknowledge that ACTEW does have problems in this exercise that we simply have to address, as is suggested by the editorial in the Canberra Times, then frankly you are starting behind the eight ball in this debate.

I want to make some rounding up comments on a few things that were raised in the course of the debate. Mr Corbell was very critical of the lack of use of a tender process by ACTEW to elect ABN AMRO as its adviser in this matter. I repeat what was said in question time. ACTEW is a corporation with independence guaranteed by legislation passed by this place. They have the capacity to make those decisions as they see fit. It may well be that they would have been able to obtain a cheaper offer of advice by going to tender, but could they get anybody with the same level of expertise and knowledge of ACTEW's operations and of the electricity market generally by taking the cheaper option? A decision was made by ACTEW to go down that path and I believe that we should let them make that decision. In fact, we had bleating from those opposite only a few months ago in the course of this debate that we were not letting ACTEW get on with the job, that we were constraining ACTEW's decision-making processes in the way that we were interfering in its events. Now we are told that we should have intervened to impose a competitive process on them. What exactly do they want? Obviously, whatever we do not do is what they want.

The suggestion was made by Mr Berry in the course of question time today that John Mackay, prior to his appointment, was in favour of maintaining ACTEW without any merger option. I should point out that nowhere in the article referred to by Mr Berry does Mr Mackay discuss a merger - nowhere. In fact, Mr Mackay denies, I understand, that he at any stage discussed the question of a merger with Mr Downie in his interview. Indeed, to be fair to Mr Downie, the word "merger" appears only in the headline to the article, not anywhere else. So, once again, I think misrepresentation has occurred here about what was being said and it is very clear that Mr Mackay was not addressing his mind to a merger.

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