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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (16 February) . . Page.. 180 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

property to be sold at a later time, then it should be sold. If the property should be retained, then it will be retained. What Mr Wood knows and what Mr Wood does not tell the Assembly is that when any ACT Housing property is sold the money goes back into ACT Housing. If it is appropriate to change the mix, the blend and the location of the houses and the properties that we have, then we should do it. What we should not be bound to is a 30-, 40-, 50-year history of being in a certain street. We should be meeting the needs of the tenants. We should not just be meeting the needs of the system.

MR OSBORNE: My question is to Mr Humphries. Minister, would you please outline the processes that the Government followed in choosing to enter into negotiation for a joint venture between AGL and ACTEW, particularly why tenders were not called after the expressions of interest had been received and why a probity auditor was not appointed from the outset, as occurred in South Australia and Victoria?

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I have indicated already to this Assembly that the process of calling for expressions of interest on potential partners for ACTEW was a process that was steered substantially by the ACTEW board. ACTEW invited expressions of interest. They received 39 such expressions of interest and they then proceeded to examine them in detail.

ACTEW is the commercial body which is responsible for establishing the kind of position it will take in the marketplace in response to the highly competitive and most unsettled and unstable marketplace that I have described on a number of occasions already in this place. It is their responsibility to give advice to government on the way in which they should be able to take on that challenge as a commercial enterprise. It was their responsibility to consider the various expressions of interest. It was their decision, having done that, to identify a potential partnership with AGL as the best way of progressing the needs of ACTEW and, in turn, the ACT community - the shareholders in ACTEW, in effect.

Mr Speaker, calling for a tender in that process would have been inappropriate. It is not simply a case of saying, "We have a business. Who wants to tender to be part of our business or to share in our business opportunities?". There are countless variations on how that particular question might be answered, and people could be answering quite different questions. People might be bidding for different parts of the business in order to do a particular partnership. They might be bidding for different kinds of relationships. They might be bidding for a purchase or sale of part of the business. There is no easy, strict comparison between particular proposals.

AGL put forward a sound proposal which reduced exposure on the part of ACTEW and gave it a chance to broaden its base within the energy market in Australia, to expand into gas as well and therefore minimise risk by taking that step. The ACTEW board firmly recommended to the Government that this was an appropriate proposal to explore, and the Government is now doing that.

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