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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 13 Hansard (20 November) . . Page.. 3793 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

In acknowledgment of this, the government has quite appropriately said that it will ensure that a safety net operates; that it will provide for concessions through the Essential Services Consumer Council for customers identified as suffering hardship. It has also said in a statement the minister made on 10 October:

The government will also increase the electricity rebate for pensioners and other relevant beneficiaries to reflect the percentage increase in their bills.

I welcome that statement by the Treasurer. It provides a pretty clear indication that the government is prepared to act. The motion Mr Cornwell has moved today clarifies where the Assembly would expect that kind of action to extend to. In defining who relevant beneficiaries are, Mr Cornwell makes it clear that he is talking about low-income earners in general and self-funded retirees, a class of people who are sometimes not included among people who are suffering hardship. But when overheads increase, obviously those on fixed incomes have limited capacity to find additional resources to meet those sorts of bills.

When other major infrastructure or structural changes have been announced in Australian public life in the last 10 years, they have generally been accompanied by mechanisms to offset short-term and medium-term effects on those who are disadvantaged by those reforms. An example is the introduction of the goods and services tax three or four years ago, when a very elaborate raft of measures was provided to assist those on low incomes. It is generally acknowledged that those measures did blunt very substantially, if not entirely, the effect of the goods and services tax.

At the present time the federal government is debating in the public arena what mechanisms should be put in place to offset the full sale of Telstra-measures which focus on upgrading telecommunications, particularly in regional and rural areas.

The ACT had its own debate a couple of years ago with respect to the deregulation of the milk vending industry, when the monopoly arrangements that were previously in place were dismantled. There were not any compensating mechanisms for consumers in those arrangements, quite appropriately since the price of milk fell and consumers got cheaper milk almost immediately as a result of the changes. But certainly compensation mechanisms were put in place to deal with vendors, particularly home vendors, who had monopolies previously at their disposal withdrawn. I think those mechanisms have worked out in the end, but it was important to have cash compensation for those who previously had a lucrative concession available to them for the sale of milk.

A critical issue in respect of full retail contestability-this a matter that was raised in the report-is the metering of electricity usage. There are two options for that. One is deemed profiling, by which providers determine a profile of usage for classes of consumers in order to assist in forecasting load requirements and meters are read at regular intervals-say, each month or each quarter. The other is full metering, whereby a lot of new infrastructure has to be installed, obviously at a cost that ultimately is borne by consumers, but the outcome is a more accurate reflection of actual electricity usage.

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