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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 5 Hansard (8 May) . . Page.. 1359 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Mr Smyth has already outlined what the government did at that time. It put in place a package to support both Kendell Airlines and Hazelton Airlines. It put in place a $200,000 package for the Canberra Tourism and Events Corporation to make sure that a campaign was run to revive visitor numbers to the ACT, and it provided a further $100,000 to the national capital tourism education project, which was very important in bringing many young people to the national capital.

To describe a package of that kind as being inadequate, particularly when at the time it had the full support of the Labor opposition, is a little bit much. I credit Ms MacDonald's comments to the fact that she was not fully briefed on that matter and perhaps was given information that did not give the complete picture on what was going on. The full picture is very different.

It is particularly unfortunate to set the bar at a level that says that if a government attempts to take a step to save an enterprise or to save the jobs of people in a particular enterprise and fails to do so it must therefore be at fault. To set that standard for any government anywhere in Australia is extremely dangerous.

The next time a major national company fails in the ACT, and we call on the ACT government to save that company or at least save the jobs of the people in that company in the ACT, if we take Ms MacDonald's remarks at face value, the government of the day will be left with an impossibly large task. That would be the new standard, if Ms MacDonald's remarks are to be taken at face value. I think she may repent those remarks at leisure.

I reinforce the fact that the opposition supports this motion. We see it as tragic that Ansett Airlines has failed. We regret that we were not single-handedly able to save Ansett Airlines here in the ACT, but I am very satisfied that we took the very best steps possible to save the jobs of a large number of people in the ACT and indeed succeeded in that respect, in that a number of jobs were sustained in this territory as a result of those steps.

I hope that the measures Australian governments generally can take over the next few years will reinforce the safety net around the airline industry and reinforce the sense of sustainability of that industry. By the same token, in the last two or three years, a significant number of Australian companies have failed-from HIH to One.Tel to Ansett Airlines, and so the list goes on. Now a number of insurance companies are facing difficulties.

It is impossible to expect government to be able to save the jobs of all the people in all of those companies. In some cases it is possible to save some jobs. In some cases it is possible to bail out those enterprises for a period of time, sometimes permanently. But it is impossible to set the standard that government's responsibility is to make sure that no company ever goes under and takes the jobs of people with it. I hope we understand that we can do so much and are able to take those steps when they are appropriate.

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