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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2795 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

of the ACT Insurance Authority. I believe there is an important distinction these days between a statutory authority within the administration and a corporation that falls under the territory's own Corporations Act.

The other amendments that I will be moving relate to indemnities to third parties which the act allows the minister to give. We believe that those are matters that should be advised to the Assembly.

I will also be moving amendments in relation to the size of the board of management. I believe that this should be an expert authority. We need to try to create a balance so there is not more client representation than expert or specialist representation on the board of management. Allowing expertise to govern the process of insurance and risk management across the administration is a step in the right direction. As I said, we will be supporting the principles and the aims of the bill.

MS TUCKER (6.06): The Greens will be supporting this bill, which establishes a captive insurer for the ACT government to provide better management of the territory's insurable risks. Through this new insurance corporation the territory will be able to have flexible, stable and, hopefully, cheaper insurance. This seems to be a good extension of the self-insurance arrangements that the government has had in the past.

I will be supporting Mr Quinlan's amendments to change the name from the ACT Insurance Corporation to the ACT Insurance Authority. I do not support the Liberal government's mimicking of private enterprise by setting up government agencies-especially those concerned with government services-with accompanying principles and running them like a business regardless of the real differences that exist between the role of government doing what is best for the public interest and the single-minded profit motives of private enterprise. The name given to these bodies may be only symbolic but it is still important to provide the right symbols of what government should really be about.

I am not sure I want to listen to Mr Humphries' arguments on Mr Quinlan's amendments relating to the number of appointed directors. I can see how the process could be more democratic and transparent if the clients of the insurance corporation were represented on its board.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (6.08),in reply: I thank members for their support of the bill. This is an important piece of legislation. Clearly, in the last few years the territory has had to come to grips with a large insurance portfolio of responsibilities and it has become apparent that we have not had the ideal structure for the management of the territory's insurance requirements. So we have proposed in this bill that we effectively create a body which will notionally be the territory insurer.

There is a limited range of responsibilities but we need to make sure that we have a flexible body to deal with that arrangement. A captive insurer, as it is called, seems to be the best way of giving ourselves the flexibility we need but preserving an internal arrangement whereby the ACT basically self-insures for most of the insurable risk.

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