Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .
Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (16 February) . . Page.. 175 ..
MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, I have a quick supplementary question. Thank you for that response, Minister. I am sure that when you have a look at the report you will decide that it is singularly uninformative. If we are getting a report, we need to know what it means, and I do not know at the moment. Given that the one report of failure against target was in connection with objections against revenue collections - we did not meet that target - will the Treasurer investigate at the same time whether the department's imposition of a $50 objection fee is discouraging Canberrans from exercising their democratic right to appeal against government decisions that they believe to be unfair?
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, if the department has not reached its revenue targets, it will be most unusual. My experience is that the department has always been very conservative about revenue targets. When you are putting together a budget, it is very tempting to say, "We can be a little bit less conservative about revenue targets. We think we are going to do better than we are doing on these projections. Can we do better than that?". As Mr Kaine probably recalls, they are very conservative about these sorts of things.
I am not sure I would say that a $50 objection fee would contribute to a situation where we were undershooting on revenue targets. In fact, I would have thought that the objection fee helped us to achieve the targets because people presumably are less likely to complain about an assessment of revenue that they have had. But I could be wrong about that. I will be open-minded about that, and I will examine the matter that Mr Kaine has put in his supplementary question as well.
MR CORBELL: Mr Speaker, my question, through you, is to the Chief Minister. Chief Minister, can you confirm that the Government's information technology arm, InTACT, has told local IT recruitment companies who have been dislodged by the new single tenderer, Interim HR Solutions, that they are not to contact Interim to discuss the payment of a handling fee and the buying out of the contracts of the contractors who will now be employed by Interim?
MS CARNELL: I have no idea what private discussions have taken place between InTACT and anybody else. How would I, or why should I?
MR CORBELL: I ask a supplementary question. Mr Speaker, why has the Government, through InTACT, decided to forbid local Canberra IT companies from negotiating some form of compensation for the transfer of contractors originally engaged by them for InTACT, when this is a common industry practice? Chief Minister, if you do not know, will you find out?
MS CARNELL
: Mr Speaker, it is certainly not the Minister's role to know what InTACT talk about with companies they deal with on a day-to-day basis. If Mr Corbell thinks it is, he is simply wrong. I am fascinated that Mr Corbell would think that InTACT was operating so efficiently prior to last December that it was appropriate for InTACT to be dealing with in excess of 20 - actually it was more than that - individual suppliers of expertise, of staff, and that that was a better situation than going out to public tender to get a single supplier of contractors. If Mr Corbell honestly believes that
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .