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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 8 Hansard (31 August) . . Page.. 2810 ..

MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Quinlan! You must not pre-empt debate on matters on the notice paper.

Mr Moore: Thank you, Mr Speaker. I was going to take that point of order and stop him in his tracks.

MR QUINLAN: I was just letting members know that that has been around since April 1999, Michael. It comes from my very efficient and effective committee. That report does contain a little history because it summarises annual reports. In amongst it are comments upon the operation of CanDeliver back in 1997-98.

I have a little synopsis of the government's response to our report on CanDeliver for that time. You will be happy to know that, at least back then, optimism reigned supreme. CanDeliver's result was considered acceptable, given that the company had entered a new and very competitive market without an established business or client base and limited capital. There might hang the tale.

I think all we can really say of CanDeliver-and it is a bit sad to see this in this particular week, Mr Speaker-is that it is another government enterprise upon which there are the fingerprints of people who frequent this Assembly. It failed. I am sorry to say that this is another black mark on the capacity of this government to do business. All we can say, I guess, is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Mr Humphries: It was a good idea.

MR QUINLAN: Yes. I believe, Mr Speaker, that it could have been a good idea if we had had better management and better direction from the government.

Mr Humphries: Oh, it's the government's fault it didn't work.

MR QUINLAN: Absolutely. As I said, it just happens to be a sorry week. We see an organisation pass into obscurity, having lost us a few bob along the way. With regret, Mr Speaker, we have to support the bill.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (8.32), in reply: Mr Speaker, I think CanDeliver was successful in the objective which it set out to achieve, which was to capture a proportion of outsourcing that was going on in Canberra at the time to the ACT private sector. It set out to do that, among other things, and it achieved that. The ABS figures on the extent of outsourcing and the extent of private sector take-up of outsourcing by ACT companies have demonstrated a very high degree of take-up by those companies of opportunities in the ACT, Mr Speaker, and I think we have much to thank CanDeliver for for that phenomenon.

Only yesterday the Chief Minister was making reference to the extraordinary growth in the IT sector in the ACT, which, as those opposite interjected, was a product of Commonwealth outsourcing. What has been described as a uniformly bad thing, namely outsourcing, in fact in this case has produced some wonderfully good dividends for the ACT community. I think CanDeliver played a role in that because CanDeliver was able

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