Page 2615 - Week 12 - Thursday, 16 November 1989
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is. In particular, I will be addressing the Assembly next Tuesday on the implementation in one large Chinese city of a television surveillance system over the people, over their streets, by the Australian-funded systems in China.
I think if the Liberal Party is going to bring conscience to the next Federal government it can well look at the correlation between overseas aid and human rights and pragmatic benefits to be derived from overseas aid. We have seen the admission by Stephen FitzGerald recently about warehousing and other activities in China, which have done nothing multilaterally for our country's economy and which have been a waste of taxpayers' funds.
I personally welcome the abolition of the coal export levy, with a $52m saving. Anyone from Wollongong would understand why I do that. I will not waste the time of the Assembly, other than to say that that levy enabled the mateship system of contracting, the working down of the smaller collieries and the grinding out of competition in the coal industry. That was the scourge of Wollongong and resulted in vast problems for the union movement and union workers in Wollongong.
Mr Speaker, there are a number of issues that the Rally has promoted. The superannuation lump sum threshold has been raised. We mentioned that somewhere along the way. Also we believe that that should be brought in, together with an approved annuity system so that superannuants in this Territory - and there are a lot of them - plough their money into approved annuities that we could possibly use in the Territory on a microeconomic basis. I am sure Mr Kaine and I will talk about that further; he is evidently interested in it.
Mr Speaker, there are some hard-hitting proposals in the tax policy in terms of privatisation. It is proposed to privatise the Pipeline Authority. The Rally absolutely agrees with that. We have already put that to this Assembly. It should be privatised as soon as possible. It is a bureaucratic monster. It is not even able to deliver gas on a equitable basis to this Territory. We know about that $2.6m surcharge that we are wearing. I believe that private industry could do better for the Territory in that regard.
Let us look at other privatisation proposals. The Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation is gaining contracts around the world at the moment. It is a marvellous corporation. There is no reason why it cannot move into a commercial mode and free up the rest of its shackles. I believe the Rally will disagree with the privatisation of Aussat and OTC; I am hoping it will. I speak from a personal point of view because that is not yet cleared by the Rally's executive. I believe that defence considerations should outweigh privatisation arguments in that area.
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