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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (5 June) . . Page.. 1973 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

to that. But since that time, pondage has been included in the lower Molonglo water control centre complex and the risk of overflow is diminished even further.

I guess I should address the reasons why we will not be supporting part (2) (b) of Ms Tucker's motion, as amended. First of all, the motion talks about control being returned to the government.

Ms Tucker: Return the operation.

MR QUINLAN: Yes. We have never surrendered control other than-

Ms Tucker: Operation.

MR QUINLAN: Okay. So effectively we want to just talk about the-

Ms Tucker: The management of the water services.

MR QUINLAN: The management of water supply in Canberra is done by contract between Actew and ActewAGL. The legislative responsibilities all rest with Actew. I think Mrs Dunne-it might have been Ms Tucker-mentioned the type of arrangement that is in place. But, in fact, in terms of the legislative responsibility, the legislative framework, Actew-the one that we actually owned outright rather than only half own these days-still holds the responsibility and makes its contractual arrangements with ActewAGL on the basis of its responsibility.

I have got a briefing, Ms Tucker, that I will give you a copy of if you like, of how the various acts-the Utilities Act, the Partnership Facilitation Act, the Environment Protection Act, the Territory Owned Corporations Act and the Water Resources Act-work together to maintain that responsibility. I would table it, except that I want to read from it.

In my time at Actew I had the job of putting ActewAGL together from the original electricity authority and the water administration that existed in the old Department of Housing and Construction. Quite clearly, the objective of that was to provide some economies of scale to a utility in a relatively small jurisdiction, and those economies of scale were achieved.

I was certainly not a happy person to see half of Actew sold off into that joint venture. But the point is that at this stage there are difficulties inasmuch as the joint venture does not own the water assets. It does own a lot of the plant, it does own a lot of the common pool of plant and it does ensure that its day labour force works in a complementary fashion. People can dig holes for electricity and they can dig holes for water. I presume that the primary option would be effectively to set up a water authority quite independent from Actew or effectively a water authority as a subset of Actew while all the physical management of ActewAGL happened quite discretely.

So, for that reason, for purely practical reasons, I am at this stage not convinced that there is much to be gained by looking at trying to pull that apart. What we certainly do need to do is maintain the legislative framework, maintain the controls, to ensure that the water

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