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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 622 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

I remember on the same day one of those appalling speeches from the Chief Minister about being excited about growth here and growth there and growth wherever. I would like to hear how our water business is going to grow. I would like to hear how our sewerage business is going to grow. I would like to hear how electrical distribution around the ACT is going to grow. I would like to hear how the electrical retail business is going to grow when we are a junior partner of AGL, when we are buying our wholesale energy from AGL.

Mr Humphries: We are not a junior partner. We are a fifty-fifty partner.

MR QUINLAN: Not with the AGL that has two million customers, not with the AGL that goes out and buys all the energy. You are not going to be fifty-fifty with them. You are going to be a subsidiary. That is what we are going to be. Still we have doom, doom, doom unless you flog it now.

According to figures published by ACTEW, I think when the current CEO was in place, and when most of the members of the board who are there now were in place - figures that were regurgitated by ABN AMRO - ACTEW will not wither on the vine. ACTEW will produce profits exceeding $70m and growing through to the year 2003, where the table ends. That is without retail, with retail contributing nothing, or next to nothing. It seems to me that we get a different story for a different plot.

This time the plan does address to some extent the retail arm of ACTEW, but it also has the baggage: "You have to sell some assets. We are not giving you a straight deal". The strategy is different now. We have no information to speak of, we have no figures, we have no target and, as far as the Government is concerned, we have no public debate if it can be avoided.

As we have said, the only problem clearly identified is the risk in retail electricity trading. AGL - I think it is AGL, because we got a list of unnamed people or organisations that submitted expressions of interest - had as its option No. 1 a partnership in electricity retail, with all the benefits that we talk about, the amelioration of the risk in retail gone, the attachment to AGL's acquisitions at the wholesale level and no sale of assets. That option is not preferred. What was wrong with that one?

That would have fixed the problem, and at the same time it would have complied with the wishes of the people of the ACT so clearly expressed during the ACTEW privatisation debate. But it is not even on the table. This Assembly has not been given the courtesy or the credit of having made available to it all of the propositions that have been available to this Government. Ask yourself why. From time to time we see both the Chief Minister and the Treasurer ducking behind the board of ACTEW, saying, "The board of ACTEW decided this, not us. We did not decide this. Should you people on the other side of the house dare to criticise them, then we will piously defend their honour. We have used them as human shields. We will piously defend their honour, as we do with public servants". Look at the public servants the Chief Minister has thrown out of the boat along the way as fiasco upon fiasco has become public knowledge. It is very cynical. She cynically showers praise on her public servants at Christmas time.

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