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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Wednesday, 4 August 2004) . . Page.. 3410 ..

Member states of the European Union and the European Union at that meta-level have made a considerable effort to develop contract law to make public-private partnerships work and to ensure, as Mr Hargreaves said, that the risk is managed by appropriate people. The failure of the Victorian tram contract was simply due to the fact that the wrong people managed the risk and there was a lack of governance. When we talk about governance we need to ensure that a body of law supports appropriate public-private partnerships.

Last year at the Madrid conference, Chris Mulligan spoke at length about achieving deregulation in a competitive environment. He referred to many case studies in which public-private partnerships had been instituted; where, in the first flush of economic rationalism in the late seventies and eighties there had been many problems; and how, through changes in the legislation and improved accountability, quality partnerships had been able to develop. So we are taking great steps forward in the provision of high quality public transport in European cities because of the involvement of public-private partnerships.

As I said earlier, in Australia we are pretty much transfixed by the idea that public transport is something paid for out of the public purse. That is not the experience of our trading competitors in Europe. While I welcome the remarks made by Mr Hargreaves, I look forward to having an opportunity to read the papers presented to the National Conference of Parliamentary Environment and Public Works Committees. I regret that I did not have the opportunity to attend the conference or the discussions on public-private partnerships. However, I welcome the opportunity to discuss them in the chamber. This should be the beginning of a process of discussion.

Even if Mr Hargreaves is not convinced, I firmly believe that the way forward for major infrastructure financing, especially in the area of public transport in the ACT, is through public-private partnerships. We must start the discussion so we can get it right and learn from the experiences of our colleagues in Melbourne who got it wrong the first time around, and we can learn from the vast body of experience gained by our European and American neighbours.

MS DUNDAS (12.14): I thank Mr Hargreaves for moving this motion today. Some interesting issues were raised at the National Conference of Parliamentary Environment and Public Works Committees, not just in relation to public partnerships but also in relation to environmental sustainability. A number of different topics were covered at that conference. Referring specifically to public-private partnerships, the ACT Democrats are open to establishing how public-private partnerships can benefit the community by enabling greater investment in things such as public transport. However, we have ongoing concerns about the ability for public-private partnerships to be mismanaged, resulting in taxpayers being left with huge debts and very little to show for it.

I looked through the papers received by that conference. Mr Hargreaves referred to some of the key points in those papers, but other interesting things were put forward. Mr Doug Jones, national president of Engineers Australia, spoke about a discussion paper that was released in 2002 entitled “Public investment in infrastructure: justified and effective.” He referred to one of the benefits of that paper as follows:

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