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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 11 Hansard (30 November) . . Page.. 3491 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

The minister's press release says:

no additional perpetual hire car licences will be issued at present. However, a further review of licensing arrangements, community needs and industry viability will be conducted before June 2002.

It will be too late by then. It says:

To provide greater flexibility for the industry, operators wishing to undertake work in addition to the wedding and school formal market...

That is what the minister quoted in his speech. I know for a fact that the industry does not support that view. You say:

Pure rubbish! When the minister talked about no extra licences, he used the term "no extra petrol licences". Does that exclude gas licences? Is this just playing with words? Ordinarily I would have let that one slip through to the keeper but, given this minister's record in the last couple of days, I look at every single word he says to try to find out whether in my mind he can be trusted.

One of the things that came out of this review which the government curiously has not particularly addressed in the public arena is the enforcement of the regimes which already exist. We know that there are RHVs out there doing work which is not permitted under the legislation. We know that there are next to no enforcement regimes. They are relying on people dobbing folks in, and by the time they get there nothing happens. If you want to clean up the hire car industry, existing regulations must be enforced and more inspectors must be put on. Bad luck if it is going to cost you a couple of quid. Put them on and empower them to do something immediate about it-on-the-spot fines or whatever else you like. At the moment the enforcement of the different types of licensing is an absolute joke. We are saying that we should free it up for the Queanbeyan people. Actually it is already happening. Let us formalise it. Why is it happening? Because we cannot enforce our own legislation.

The minister said that current perpetual licence investments will be supported by extra licences. I would say that it works the other way around. If you have bought a licence for $120,000 and you lease it out and the person who is leasing it from you can get it for less than that he is going to do it. The bottom just drops clean out of the value of those vehicles. The fact the you are introducing extra players into the marketplace means that $300,000 is going to be left in the bucket. That is going to shrink the value of the business. Any suggestion that it is going to support it is nonsense.

I remind the government that the last paragraph in the motion has been amended to read:

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