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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4135 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed. I take Mr Quinlan's point. He did bag the whole lot, and I think that is similarly unsustainable. The fact is, Mr Speaker, that these were contracts that were coming, for the most part, from the public sector. They were contracts for work that had been done for decades, in cases, inside government and was now moving outside government into the private sector. There was clearly a case for having people at the helm who understood the workings of government and the public sector as well as having business people who understood the exigencies and the pressures that exist in the private sector and would be able to work out how to receive the work once it had been delivered to CanDeliver.

Mr Speaker, the structure of CanDeliver was expensive. There is no doubt about that. It was expensive to obtain on-going top-quality advice in the form of the CanDeliver board, and there was some criticism of that in one of the committees that examined the annual reports this year. I think it was Mr Quinlan's committee. So be it, Mr Speaker. It was expensive, but I consider, as I said, that the role that CanDeliver was playing was an appropriate role - a role of winning business directly to the subcontractors to CanDeliver, and also creating an environment where outside corporate players would not be able to clean up in the ACT market because there was a lack of similarly sized players already in that market.

The other comment which has to be made and which I made, I think, on Tuesday anyway is that the volume of outsourcing expected from the Commonwealth was nothing like what was originally anticipated. I think most observers expected that there would be a flood of work in all sorts of fields, such as human resource management, payroll, IT services and so on, that would come floating into the private sector for operators to pick up. That has not materialised, and I have my doubts about whether it will materialise at any time soon. Perhaps that has underscored to the Commonwealth that it is not necessarily the simple matter they might have originally imagined; that they would simply now do in the private sector the same job being done in the public sector. There were obviously going to be some problems with that, particularly over a short space of time, and those have probably materialised.

I think, in the circumstances, those factors are themselves a matter we can point to to explain the reasons for CanDeliver's lack of being able to achieve a surplus position in the time it was in existence, but I do not think that in any way, as I have said, detracts from the purpose of having CanDeliver there in the first place or from the need to similarly work with the private sector in the future, if not through CanDeliver then through some other similar vehicle, to make sure that we keep that kind of work in Canberra.

I commend the motion to the house and ask members to provide for the necessary work to go on over the next couple of months, ideally for the subcontractors of CanDeliver to be able to pick up the work that CanDeliver is presently doing and result in there being no break or breach of the contracts that CanDeliver has entered into. I think it is very important for the good name of the Territory and its territory owned corporations that we not leave in the lurch as a result of CanDeliver's untimely demise those Commonwealth agencies and others who have got contracted work with CanDeliver.

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