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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 624 ..

Mr Humphries: You want to sell the business associated with the retailing of electricity, don't you?

MR QUINLAN: What are the assets?

Mr Humphries: Assets to do with the sale of electricity.

MR QUINLAN: Gary, you do not have a clue. Just keep out of it. Keep pretending. Within this deal there are promises of a gas-fired power station and a call centre. But if we have compromised our negotiating position, it is highly likely we are buying them anyway. The only difference is we will not own them. But we will have sacrificed our competitiveness in negotiation. We have got a lesser deal than we might have got otherwise. As a function of that, we would be virtually buying our own power station, except that AGL would own it. We would buying our own call centre, except that AGL would own it.

I have further fears. These are not fears born of my imagination. They arise from a few words dropped in briefings that I have had on this matter. I fear that after this partnership is formed there will be further asset stripping. We have a recidivist public assets seller in the Government and we have an expanding AGL that is investing capital in quite a number of ventures. How long will it be after we form a partnership with AGL that we hear that the joint venture is probably overcapitalised, that we need to make it more commercially competitive and that we need to change its capital gearing and restructure its capital structure?

What is that all going to be code for? That is going to be code for: "Let us load it up with a bit of debt and take some more money out of it". The term is "selling down". That was the process embedded in the Great Southern Energy report that came forward. We were going to take $686m out of that deal. Had that happened, had we taken an equalisation payment and sold down the organisation - asset stripped it, effectively - then the promise of this easy back-out would become very complicated, would it not? All of sudden, if we wanted to get our assets back, we would have to go further in debt, beyond critical level, or we would have to find the money we already took in the equalisation payment.

We have heard the Treasurer's assurances that the equalisation payment would go to the superannuation fund, but that is not enough if you do not put in your normal annual payment as well. If you put in the money you get from selling assets to AGL and then do not make the normal annual contribution at the same time, it effectively boils down to nothing. They are hollow words, and it is a hollow promise. We had a hollow promise before about the $300m that is coming out of ACTEW. No further cash is going into the superannuation fund, when the superannuation fund requires both. We have taken capital out of ACTEW and put it in the superannuation fund because we have not put the annual contribution in the superannuation fund. We are spending the capital we took from ACTEW. We are spending it now.

There is no reason to think that this Government will change its spots in the space of 12 months. The promise that the money will go into the superannuation fund, that it will be quarantined, is hollow unless that promise extends to this Government, for the first

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