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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 849 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I am not a manager. I am not involved in either AGL or ACTEW. I do not want to be. But I do want to see those two organisations work towards a successful outcome. The bottom line, and both the signatories of that letter acknowledge it, is that if at any stage during the process of negotiating we as a legislature believe the outcome is not going to be what we are looking for, we, as a legislature, can terminate it. We can simply pass a resolution that says, "The Government should break off all negotiations on this matter". I think it would have to be a pretty serious situation before we would do that. This puts us in our rightful place, Mr Speaker, and I commend to the Assembly my amendment to Mr Quinlan's amendments to Mr Humphries' motion.

MR QUINLAN (7.59): I seek leave to speak again.

MR SPEAKER: In fact, you are speaking to Mr Kaine's amendment to your amendments, so you do not need leave.

MR QUINLAN: Mr Speaker, I put my amendments through on the advice received from the Clerk's office. Effectively, it swings on clause 11 (3) (b) of the Bill which reads:

That means that the Minister may not, unless by resolution, approve the vesting of it. The purpose of my amendment is to water down the level of approval so that it does not comply totally with the Territory Owned Corporations Act. I think what we have here is a difference of legal opinion. I am not qualified to make a final judgment, but my reading of it says that my amendment would have had the desired effect. It would have permitted the Government to go ahead and negotiate, but it would not have permitted the Government to vest the assets, even using the Facilitation Bill once it is passed. That would have allowed both instruments to pass tonight but with that one qualification.

I have to add to that that we did discuss in my committee whether we would self refer this Bill and the majority decision was that we would not. All I can do, Mr Kaine, is submit to you that that was my intention. That was pretty well how we discussed it informally. I rather think that if we do not have this negotiation process we can be advised as to what is happening, but we can be advised without one scintilla of capacity to change what is happening. That would seem to me to be building a fairly hollow process. If in fact we got to a point where we did not like what was happening or where, as we have seen today, some of the numbers did not add up, or may not add up, we could not change that. We have given the full tick to the process and all we will get is progress reports from the parties. I think they will all be honourable people, but I just want to make the point that the words "negotiation of" must remain for us to exercise any level of responsibilities.

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