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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (13 February) . . Page.. 29 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

There are a few things that I would like to comment on in relation to the recommendations. For the first time, I think, the government has accepted the fact that Canberra has not changed much in terms of its public sector/private sector balance. In a briefing that the committee reported on 9 November, as much was said. I would love to read it into Hansard, but I have already done that, doing so last year at the first opportunity.

But it is recognised by at least the Treasury officials who prepared the Treasurer's briefing to us that in large part the improvement in the ACT economy has been through the public sector, through the Commonwealth spending, through Y2K expenditure, through increases in staff within the taxation department as a function of its reorganisation and, of course, the GST implementation, that little vote winner that Mr Howard brought in, and the National Museum on the construction side.

There are a number of recommendations here and, again, I do commend to members of the government that they do at least look at them. A lot of them are about saying, "Please set out the information that comes forward to the Assembly in a fashion that we can understand and that we can know precisely what is happening so that we can make informed decisions." That includes an analysis of what the ACT government thinks is the impact that Commonwealth government expenditure and policies will have on the ACT economy.

We have seen an increase in Commonwealth funding to the ACT and we can see that change, given that our financial circumstances have changed. The Commonwealth Grants Commission analysis is about offsetting disadvantages. If those disadvantages are not biting-I do not want to say this too loudly-there could be a change in the level of Commonwealth funding that the territory receives.

There are a number of recommendations that I will not bore members with. I do want to focus somewhat on superannuation. Let me go back a bit. A couple of years ago, almost the same players, or at least several of the same players, were involved in the Select Committee on the Territory's Superannuation Commitments. That committee made some observations and recommendations. Among those was the observation that if we sold ACTEW and we cash funded our superannuation liability we would be holding a lot of paper investment and we would be subject to the vicissitudes of the equity and bond markets.

We saw the result of that when we got a reconciliation from government. This committee asked for a reconciliation from the government as to why the last completed financial year had improved by $90 million. Some $33 million of that was a result of change in the value of investments and a lot of that was a function of the depreciation of the Australian dollar and the consequent appreciation of offshore investments. These things can disappear as quickly as they appear, yet we are reporting results that are encouraging a certain approach by various stakeholders in relation to budget figures.

I firmly recommend to this government that it separate the accounting for superannuation and set up a superannuation trust, or at least examine the possibility of doing so, like many businesses do and virtually all governments do so that the results of superannuation investment do not distort the operating bottom line and we will not

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