Page 2372 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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for members and checking information provided by Ministers and their departments. Without these efforts from all committee staff, under the direction of Ms Malmberg, the report you see today would not have been available.
I must also thank committee members who, whenever possible in their busy schedules, participated in the proceedings. My task, Mr Speaker, was made much easier by the way in which they conducted their questioning and accepted my directions as chairman when they sometimes strayed from the business at hand.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (10.46): Mr Speaker, I had not intended to speak on this matter today, and I had thought that it might be adjourned to allow every member of the Assembly to speak, but it looks as though nobody wants to, so I guess I should say a few words at this stage.
Mr Speaker, I think that the process we adopted in generating this report really, as much as anything, highlighted some weaknesses in our system because of the fact that we are not yet up to speed on how to deal with matters as significant as a budget.
I have no criticism of the report, although I do not agree with all of it. I cannot possibly agree with all of it for the obvious reason that I was unable to attend every minute of every session, I did not participate in questioning all of the witnesses, and I do not know what happened during a great deal of the time that was spent on the estimates. I will come to that point in a minute. I cannot agree with everything that is in it, and I think that the report may even be significant as much for what is not contained in it as indeed for what is contained in it. I put that down perhaps to the inexperience of the members of the Assembly in dealing with a matter of the complexity and the importance of a budget.
I found, as I am sure most members did, that I simply could not find the time to sit in the committee room for every minute of virtually five sitting days which ran well into the evenings. It was an unreal expectation that most of us could ever be able to do that. Quite frankly, Mr Speaker, I am not sure how the chairman managed to disengage himself from all other activity associated with this Assembly and the electorate in order to sit there for the hours that he did. I think that it was a masterly performance on his part to be able to do that. I could not spend that time. In fact I doubt that there was any other member of this Assembly who spent even half the amount of time in that committee room that the chairman did.
Because of that, Mr Speaker, the report is, if you like, a little bit hit or miss. There were some elements of the budget where a number of us were able to attend any one session and where we felt that we had sufficient information to be able to direct some fairly pertinent questions to the witnesses, and we got some fairly
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