Page 2375 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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earmarked only for those people who have traditionally been supported from the fund. With due respect to the chairman and the other people who contributed to the decision, I was not present at the meeting when that decision was reached and I do not agree with it. I am only saying that because it highlights just one instance when I was unable to be at a particular meeting of the committee and a decision of that kind was made. It is just one of the particular aspects of the report that I disagree with.
I do not want to be too critical of the report. As I say, I think it is the process that we should be looking at this time round rather than the report itself. So with those comments, Mr Speaker, I will leave any further comment that I have to make until the debate on the Appropriation Bill itself in the detail stage.
MR DUBY (10.56): I would like to endorse the comments made by Mr Kaine in relation to the very good job performed by the chairman of this committee, the long hours that were involved and the number of tasks that he did perform. He did it creditably and I think we all owe him a debt of service. I would also like to endorse the remarks made by Mr Jensen in relation to the support we received from our committee staff, in particular Karin Malmberg, who put in many hours of very hard work coordinating things for the often clumsy questions asked by the members of the Assembly.
Like Mr Kaine, I do not intend to go through the recommendations of this report point by point. The recommendations are there; the Government will be looking at them, I dare say; and, hopefully, we will be getting a response to them within the next few weeks. I think that Mr Kaine's point was true and valid, and I think it should be pointed out that the purpose of this Estimates Committee was not, I feel, to come up with reports which criticised government expenditure or in any way interfered with government policy. I think that point needs to be made.
I would not like to think that the Government, at the end of the day, could go through and say, "They have made 20 recommendations about 20 particular items. There are hundreds of other items about which there has been no comment made at all. Therefore, they endorse those items". I think it should be stressed categorically that that is not the case. Just because something has not been mentioned or a specific program has not come under the knife, it does not mean that we endorse the expenditure of money in that program.
The budget belongs to the Government, and is the Government's policy and it is their right to bring down their budget. My party does not agree with the Government's budget policy, we do not agree with the Government's budget strategy, but we feel that they have the right to expend money in whichever way they see fit. For that purpose and that reason, we have not attacked and
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