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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 1 Hansard (8 December) . . Page.. 3990 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

enterprise, one involving hundreds of thousands of dollars of turnover each year, naturally any fallible human being will be capable of making some mistakes. I do not pretend that CanDeliver did not make some mistakes as it went about its business, but I believe the overall legacy CanDeliver has left the ACT community with is a positive legacy.

As Ms Tucker would be fond of saying, you cannot measure the success of CanDeliver purely in terms of the profit and loss statement and the balance sheet but you should measure the success in terms of other benefits which are less tangible than the existence and operation of CanDeliver. I have no doubt that CanDeliver provided to the ACT community a very real vehicle to maintain the competitive pressure on ACT businesses to get them to work together in a competitive way against outside businesses that were seeking service contracts with the Commonwealth and also provided a very real vehicle to keep jobs in the ACT that otherwise would have gone to Sydney, Melbourne or somewhere else.

In that context I think that the board of CanDeliver did extremely well. CanDeliver bid for, I think, 22 contracts, and I understand that it won 12 of those contracts. A 12 out of 22 success rate is not too bad. It is a pretty good strike rate for an organisation that has a number of competitors and was only itself very new on the ACT landscape.

I know the criticism was made that, for example, we ought not to have had former politicians and former bureaucrats in key positions on the board. Bearing in mind that we had CanDeliver bidding for ex-government work, or work that government was contracting out, particularly the Federal Government, it was highly appropriate to have people of that kind, because an understanding of politics and the bureaucracy was essential in the success of those available bids.

Mr Quinlan asked me whether I believe I should attach blame somewhere else. Yes, I do. To be perfectly frank, I think the Federal Government's approach towards the contracting out of major services left a great deal to be desired. The Commonwealth promised to reduce its expenditure on these matters through its internal processes. Instead of having public servants do certain work, it promised to put a great deal of this work out to the private sector to bid for and to do. What was promised to be a flood in 1996 and early 1997 turned into a trickle by 1999. I do not know why the Commonwealth turned back on that process. CanDeliver was given birth to on the basis that there would be that flood of work coming out and Canberra businesses needed to be well positioned to take that work. It is unfortunate that the promised flood did not turn out to be a flood, but I think that what was successfully achieved by CanDeliver was worth while. The infrastructure we invested in CanDeliver simply was not of an order that would warrant the amount of work it actually got to do. Hence the Government's preferred position, to be reflected in a motion tomorrow in the Assembly, to allow CanDeliver to divest itself of its major assets.

Those opposite were very quick, when the Commonwealth started to outsource work some time ago, to say that this was a terrible course of action. They said that we were going to have jobs disappearing from Canberra left, right and centre; that it was a ghastly decision by the Federal Government that would leave Canberra a ghost town. CanDeliver was there to make sure Canberra was not left a ghost town. Whether or not

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