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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 08 Hansard (Wednesday, 4 August 2004) . . Page.. 3408 ..

comparative performance. Better quality empirical assessments are needed and should be a priority for future policy development in this area.

There is little doubt that a perceived loss of public accountability has been a major concern throughout the recent history of PPPs in Australia. International experience suggests that while managerial accountability has increased through PPPs it has come at the cost of broader public accountability mechanisms such as parliamentary accountability and quasi-judicial accountability. I can remember speaking in this place about the debacle of the Port Phillip prison, which was just such a PPP. The way in which the contract linked the maintenance to the service contract and the building contract left the Victorian government in all sorts of trouble.

The question about accountability relates fundamentally to who is accountable to whom and for what result. The matter is further complicated when agencies are held accountable for the performance of services that are primarily delivered by the private sector. Public access to reliable information is necessary for government accountability. We need to resolve some fundamental questions such as how parliament should be involved in PPP related legislation oversight, planning process oversight, policy development oversight, implementation oversight and the oversight of contract deals.

The question of how PPP arrangements should be accounted for and disclosed in public sector financial statements and budgets also needs to be resolved. Currently, there are no Australian accounting standards that deal specifically with that. PPP arrangements are becoming increasingly complex but there must be a clear understanding and appreciation of the roles and responsibilities of relevant participants. Mr Russell Walker, Victorian Assistant Auditor-General, noted in his paper to the conference:

If PPP arrangements are to work effectively, it is important that risks are assigned to those best placed to manage the risks and that access to assets and services is obtained in the most cost effective manner, irrespective of whether or not debts sit on balance sheets.

In summary, it must be understood that PPPs are not necessarily a panacea for infrastructure financing. They are projects that are carried out over a long period and, as has been claimed, we are not fully aware of their benefits. Even though PPPs have been around for centuries there is no empirical data to sustain them. I thank members for their interest in this matter and I look forward to hearing their comments.

MRS DUNNE (12.05): When Mr Hargreaves first spoke in debate on this matter I thought for a few moments that economic rationalism was alive and well in the Labor Party. However, I was mistaken. As Mr Hargreaves said, public-private partnerships have a long history that goes back thousands of years. In this modern age there is a propensity for people to believe that it is the role of governments to provide a whole range of services that hitherto have not been provided by them. In addressing this motion I would like to deal with the provision of transport infrastructure.

Mr Hargreaves touched on transport infrastructure when he talked about the development of the railways in the nineteenth century. In a lot of emerging economies, principally in the United States of America, the development of the railways was a public-private partnership and private money was expended in return for access to land. The revenue

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