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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 769 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

sold? Was it $71 or was it something less? I worked out that, at $71, 7,811 tickets came to about $550,000, or a little bit over. Do you have a figure on how much revenue was raised from tickets?

MS CARNELL: That was two questions. We do not have a final average price yet, but a couple of days before the event the figures showed an average price of $75. The view was that the tickets that were sold on the day probably would have been, on average, the lower priced tickets, which could have brought the average down a bit. That is the reason the $71 was chosen. My understanding is that the promoters or the ticketing agency had some $774,000 in the bank prior to having to start refunding.

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, my question is also, through you, to the Chief Minister and it relates to the public relations document published recently by her and her department under the title, State of the Territory Report. This report is an interesting one because it is clearly designed to give the impression that everything that is good in Canberra is due to Mrs Carnell and her Government. It does not mention anything that is bad. For example, I went through the index carefully, and I could not find a single reference to the outcomes of such things as Feel the Power, Kinlyside, futsal, the hospital implosion, Bruce Stadium or unauthorised expenses. In fact, the document appears to be nothing more than a rehash of ABS statistics and I have heard some criticism of it. The 18-page brochure that accompanied it leaves out a few things, such as, for example, the fact that there was a 42 per cent increase in burglaries between 1997-98 and 1998-99, so one has to question what the purpose of this document was. My specific question to the Chief Minister is: What was the total cost of producing and distributing these PR documents, and how did the distribution of these documents contribute to what is claimed by the statement on the front cover, "Improving our quality of life in Canberra"?

MS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I think that the State of the Territory Report actually dramatically improved the situation, and I think it is important to look at where the idea came from for the State of the Territory Report. It came from ACTCOSS. ACTCOSS believed - and they spoke to government about this - that there needed to be a document produced in the ACT that would, apart from budgets that talked predominantly about dollars and how we are spending dollars, actually assess the state of the Territory from a perspective of quality of life, and the sorts of things that affect everyday life. We looked at that, and looked at examples from overseas where the same sort of thing is done. I think I have spoken about that earlier. There are a number of American, and maybe Canadian, states, and governments in other parts of the world that do it, that have gone down the path of the state of the nation, or state of their state or province approach.

The format of the State of the Territory Report came from those overseas reports, which were adapted to the ACT. Mr Kaine has indicated that he believed we left out the negative stuff. Well, that is just simply not the case. The issue of burglaries and increases in crime rates is actually in the report, Mr Speaker. Mr Kaine obviously did not read it.

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