Page 2373 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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comprehensive answers. In other areas of the budget where few members were present or where members felt they did not have the information that they required even to frame the relevant questions, then the response that we got from the witnesses was perhaps inadequate. That is no reflection on the officials who attended.
I think that the chairman has properly paid tribute to the support staff who put this inquiry together and assisted him to give it some direction and some guidance as to how it should be conducted, and I personally would like to record the fact that I believe the witnesses, the officials, who presented themselves before this committee also did an excellent job in the context of the questions that were asked of them.
But on the very first day, Mr Speaker, it became obvious to me that many of us simply did not have the detail supporting the budget to be able to go into an in-depth questioning of witnesses as to just what the budget meant, what was the basis on which elements of the budget were constructed, what was the process by which they had arrived at a particular figure, and where all of the support figures were that led to a figure that was actually appearing in the budget. I do not believe that in many cases we got the answers to a lot of those questions, Mr Speaker. I think we will have to properly review the Estimates Committee process before we go through it again next year.
We have to ask ourselves whether we really do need to go through the process that bigger parliaments do. There are only 17 of us, Mr Speaker, unlike the parliament across the lake, for example, which has a series of estimates committees and the members have ample time to prepare and go to a meeting and focus in on a particular aspect of the budget. All 17 of us are supposed to become instant experts in all elements of the budget and sit through a lengthy period where we all engage in the interrogatory process if we wish to satisfy ourselves individually that the budget is right.
We have talked about the nature of the workload that we carry as individual members of the Assembly; as members of several committees; as, in some cases, as Ministers of the Government who have very real and wide-ranging responsibilities to fulfil; and as members with a responsibility to the electorate out there. We are a little different because we all live in our electorates.
Our electorate office, if you like, is our office in this building. We are never free of the burdens of the electorate and we are never free of the burdens of the Assembly, unlike members of other parliaments, who perhaps have a little more time and flexibility. They are removed from their electorate for days on end, when they can focus in on the task of the day in a committee. We do not have that luxury.
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