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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 865 ..
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR QUINLAN (8.44): Thank you, Mr Speaker.
Mr Moore: Are you going to do name calling on this one too?
MR QUINLAN: It was more an appropriate adjective than a name.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Quinlan has the floor. I do not want any interjections, thank you.
MR QUINLAN: Is "hypocrite" name calling, Mr Speaker?
MR SPEAKER: If you regard it as such.
MR QUINLAN: I will not indulge in it. It goes without saying that we are a little disappointed with the position we find ourselves in now. I do not think there is much point in dwelling on it at length. Only time will tell. I anticipate a good 18 months of hoopla and openings as the new body goes through the same crass bread and circuses process we have become so used to.
The Bill, combined with the motion, confers incredible powers upon the Minister and no power whatsoever upon the ACT's legislature, which is a crazy situation.
Mr Stanhope: It is abrogation, not delegation.
MR QUINLAN: Even delegations have limits and are usually qualified in some way. I am not happy. This is a fairly sad commentary. I think it confers no dignity on this place that it made the decision it made today with the amount of information it had before it. Because of Mr Kaine's amendment, I think I am somewhere in the loop and I am going to be told what is going on. I commit to this Assembly to do my very best to ensure that the result of this exercise is the best of a very bad lot for the people of the ACT. I foreshadow that I will be moving whatever legislation I can move in this place to ensure that the merged ACTEW/AGL body cannot be asset stripped, as I rather suspect it will be.
There will be euphemisms like "It needs a capital restructure", "It is out of sync with the rest of the industry", "We could free up capital for growth". We have been promised growth all over the place. I suspect that it is never going to occur - or not much, at least. I foreshadow that I will return to this place with whatever legislative instrument I can muster to ensure that body operates to fulfil the promises that were made in this place in recent times. That will not be easy, but that is what I will be doing.
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