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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (8 March) . . Page.. 677 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
Mr Speaker, the most important issue is putting the business on a secure footing. There is another benefit which is financial which is not so much about cost savings to which Mr Stanhope referred. It is financial in one sense. It is the financial security of the people who would be without that security in the event that we do not take the step to restructure, the sort of people who in the last 11/2 to two years have lost their positions in ACTEW because of the changing environment in which ACTEW finds itself.
Mr Quinlan: It went close.
MR HUMPHRIES: Okay; perhaps the Opposition has a different idea of why those 200 jobs have gone from ACTEW in the last 12 months. My advice is that ACTEW has had to become leaner and meaner to face the reality of increased competition. It has had that competition at the level of corporate and commercial clients. It will have that competition at the level of residential clients in the very near future, Mr Speaker, and that is why, if we are serious about jobs and about protecting jobs, the Opposition will support this measure.
MR OSBORNE: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Chief Minister and it follows on from a question I asked her yesterday. Chief Minister, have you been able to confirm the exact number of tickets sold for the rock concert last week, and could you also provide this Assembly with the number of free tickets that were given away for the concert?
MS CARNELL: I think I said yesterday over 10,000. The number of tickets that were actually paid for was 10,558, if you want to be exact. That was the exact number that was paid for, and the break even point, if the average ticket sale was $71, was 7,811.
MR QUINLAN: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Treasurer. In response to one of Mr Stanhope's written questions on the proposed AGL/ACTEW partnership, ACTEW's CEO, John Mackay, advised that the changed ownership of ACTEW's water, sewerage and electricity distribution assets would have no major change from present. He did qualify his response with a little blue sky on technological change and the ability to remain abreast. I think that was the best he could rustle up at the time. Have you brought yourself sufficiently up to date to explain to this Assembly how those activities of ACTEW that are localised, natural monopolies will benefit and grow because you have sold 50 per cent of them?
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I have to repeat what I have said already ad nauseam in this place. The divesting of assets to the joint venture partnership is not a sale. I repeat that. It is not a sale. You do not sell something and then call it back when you want it afterwards, and that is what we have the capacity to do in this arrangement. So it is not a sale. I could reject the question as being hypothetical from that point onwards. However, I will not.
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