Page 2381 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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I think if the Government is growing smug on anything, it needs to be aware that it has got an Appropriation Bill to get through yet. Whilst the Rally would never stop supply, clearly the legislation indicates that amendments can be moved under section 65 of the ACT (Self-Government) Act to change money matters. There is some doubt as to the correct interpretation of that provision, and the Rally will certainly be seeking advice before the Appropriation Bill comes on.
We serve notice on the Minister that there are some issues raised in the estimates process that clearly are and must be of widespread concern to the community. The first is the proliferation of statutory authorities in the ACT and the recommendations at page 6 of the report that the Department of Education, the Department of Community Services and Health, the ACT Institute of TAFE, which seems to be something on its own in this Territory, and the Legal Aid Office be changed from statutory authorities to departments.
I have some misgivings about the committee's recommendation in terms of the Legal Aid Office, which have to do with some legal ideas of independence, but the other recommendations the Rally supports. Clearly, we do not have an Estimates Committee process that involves all the money of the Territory.
There are bodies that do not appear in the budget itself, and there are bodies, such as ACTEW, which are commercial statutory authorities. There are very large amounts in the Housing Trust - for instance, millions of dollars - that do not really come within the purview of the committee properly.
Mr Speaker, the other issues which concerned the Rally in the estimates process were the lack of information, the very broad lack of detail in the budget, and principally the recommendation at page 3 where the committee agreed that many of the expenditure proposals contained in the budget papers were presented in such broad detail as to be almost meaningless. It became clear to the committee very early in the hearings that additional information was necessary if the hearings were to be of any use to the Assembly.
What amazed me, Mr Speaker, was the fact that officials whom one would expect to have contributed to the budget process had to take so many questions on notice. Those questions were not only detailed questions where you might expect them not to have the facts with them, but there were some fundamental questions of policy going to vote allocations and the like that had to be taken on notice.
I do not include the Treasury witnesses in that, but certainly in a departmental sense the budget seems to have clearly had considerably more political direction than
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