Page 2014 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 15 June 1994
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"VITAB agreement a big winner for the ACT". Those claims have been smashed to smithereens by the Pearce report. They have been utterly and completely destroyed. This contract was a disaster for the ACT from beginning to end. It has caused us to lose our status in the Victorian pool arrangement. It has caused us to lose, possibly, hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of that arrangement. That is what the Pearce inquiry clearly indicates.
Mr Kaine: That is what the Chief Minister says is a good deal.
MR HUMPHRIES: That is what the Chief Minister said was a good deal. She has not repeated that claim today, but she also has not refuted it. She also has not withdrawn it. Mr Berry, on the other hand, rose and said that he actually still believes that the whole thing was a good deal. What the Pearce inquiry says, as I read it, is that Mr Berry said things about the deal, in this place and elsewhere, which turned out to be untrue, but he was not responsible for that because he did not know that they were untrue at the time. He was misled by other people about the facts, and that is his excuse for not being personally responsible for the fiasco which the VITAB deal has now become.
The fact is that what he said, both in this place and outside this place, was untrue. Point after point was untrue. Let me run through some of the things. We have this extraordinary statement in the Chief Minister's tabling statement today:
... none of the wild allegations by the Liberal Party about the VITAB issue has been proved correct.
Let me quote some of the things that have been said by Professor Pearce. One point we made in the course of the submission in this place was that the contract, as signed, did not give the ACT Government an adequate percentage of gross turnover. Professor Pearce said:
If the ordinary rules of TAB operations applied, this was all correct. However, they did not and on this basis the price could be seen as too low.
Point No. 2 is that the agreement returned such a large profit to the principals of VITAB, we, the Liberals, contended, that it provided them with a significant opportunity to attract punters from other TABs. What did Professor Pearce say? He said this:
The profit margin at which VITAB is running undoubtedly enables it to offer greater incentives to punters than ACTTAB is able to give. Once the step is taken of associating TAB facilities in Australia with a private TAB operation with a profit margin similar to VITAB, the opportunity for poaching through the offering of inducements significantly increases.
Strike two! The third point that we made was this: The Opposition contended in the submission and in this place that the only way the deal could have been financially acceptable to the ACT Government would have been through an agency arrangement. Professor Pearce found as follows:
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