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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 7 Hansard (6 June) . . Page.. 2006 ..

MS DUNDAS (continuing):

National competition policy was drafted at the height of economic rationalist ideology as a one-size-fits-all methodology designed to impose competitive pressure on everything, from the utilisation of water to the marketing of eggs, and now to the provision of cemeteries and crematoria.

The problem with the implementation of the national competition policy has been the under-recognition of the costs of the implementation of the policy. The focus has been almost solely on the economic pricing consequences, with too little attention paid to the economic structural effects and to social and environmental impacts. The social impacts have their own costs, which have at times exceeded the supposed economic benefits.

The public interest test needs to be applied to opening the cemetery market to privatisation and competition. The national competition policy has a public interest test that has been dominated by economic assessment ahead of the harder to measure intangible attributes in the social and environmental areas.

In this area of cemeteries, you have to take into account cultural and religious sensibilities. It is relatively easy for economists to estimate the economic impacts of the deregulation of one industry or the instigation of competition in another. It is much more difficult, however, to attribute a value to the cultural and religious impacts of these sorts of changes. But the conduct of such an assessment is essential if the real costs and benefits of the implementation of a policy are to be known. Maybe it is just too hard to measure. Maybe it is because it is a taboo subject.

It is odd that in our society issues related to death are so often not discussed. Yes, death, like taxes, is certainly one thing that everyone has in common.

So it comes as no surprise that the adequacy of cemetery planning and management is an issue that is not often discussed or reviewed, this being the first large-scale change to this act in over 60 years.

All legislators and policy makers are happy to look at demographics and declare that we need to plan more schools, hospitals or roads, yet the planning and management of cemeteries does not often come up. This leads to the general public overlooking the importance of body disposal and the memorial functions that cemeteries and crematoriums serve.

The challenge for the government and this Assembly is to overcome the taboo nature of this topic and discuss the important role that cemeteries play in our society. We need to answer questions such as: how valuable cemeteries are, what role they have in terms of heritage in this multicultural society, the costs involved in body disposal by a crematorium or cemetery, what fees and charges are reasonable and whether they should be means tested.

And should the government support the families of our disadvantaged to help them with the cost of body disposal and memorial? None of these issues is in any way solved by this bill. Rather, they leave it all to ministerial regulation-and it is probably only by debating the disallowable instruments that we will have real debate.

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