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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (10 May) . . Page.. 1384 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

be taking the literal approach. I would have thought an open government would have said, "I cannot tell you what routes they intend to develop because that's commercial-in-confidence, quite obviously, but I can tell you what milestones we have set in relation to the creation of real jobs. I can say what is in the contract in terms of when these things will happen. I can inform you that we will get a flight simulator through Raytheon and the deal with Impulse and it will not cost us another $11/2 million."

Ms Carnell: We don't know if that is the case, yet. It is not negotiated. It is not part of the contract.

MR QUINLAN: The point I am trying to make, Chief Minister, is that if there was goodwill in relation to this deal, a number of those milestones, certainly edited for genuine commercial-in-confidence, would have been placed on the table in this place previously. It was not done. I do not think you can come to this place and ask for an orgy of congratulations while you have still got that attitude. Right? I think that is a reasonable and logical position for us to take.

I want to refer to a couple of the generalisations. Your whole speech was just sweeping generalisations, Harold, but I want to refer to one or two of them. I just make the point that, yes, there are in the ACT more public sector jobs than there used to be. However, we will really become a private sector economy when the base source of the economic activity is not the public purse. What we have done is increase the size of the caravan of camp followers around government as the federal government has tried to reduce the public sector, but they are still interdependent.

There has been some growth in the ACT in relation to private sector activity that has been a spin-off of outsourcing. Companies that are providing services to our government have discovered that they can sell those services to other places, and therefore they have become ACT exports. At the same time, we have given away a lot of that business to national and multi-national companies and squeezed out our locals. In fact, some of the private sector firms that have come to town have taken work that otherwise would have been the province of some of the local firms. We have increased the competition there and some of the bigger firms with deep pockets can afford to offer loss leading projects at loss leading prices in order to sweep some of the local firms from the field. So I think we ought to be a bit more judicious in the way we describe the changes to this economy. Yes, there have been some benefits from outsourcing and there have been a lot of disbenefits. If you are going to claim one I think you should at least recognise the other.

I will close by repeating that the ALP hopes and trusts that the Impulse deal is nothing other than a blinding success. However, we still harbor some doubts because we recognise that it is a highly speculative project. Our $8 million has gone because if Impulse succeed they keep it. If they fail, if they have any business sense at all they will have ringfenced that loss and we will not get it back anyway. The particular company that was set up to run the Canberra operation will be defunct and will have no money. So we have spent that $8 million and we trust that we get a dividend on that in spades.

We certainly hope that we get the very fast train that arrives in the same place. We hope that this government or a Labor government down the road, excuse the pun, can find the way to develop the Majura Road to complete the set so that we do, in fact, become a genuine regional hub. We hope we become a genuine alternative to Sydney as a place

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