Page 4544 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
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It is really not appropriate for these matters to be dealt with by using the Treasurer's Advance. However loosely interpreted, it should not be spent on ongoing items which you should have budgeted for in the first place, and it also should not be spent because you have put the wrong figure in your government schooling budget. Mr Humphries has virtually admitted that that figure is wrong; yet Government members opposite voted for it. I cannot think why. I think it is a highly irresponsible act for them to have done that. So I would like to hear, perhaps from the Treasurer, whether he has any response to those two points.
MR KAINE (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (5.26): It is rather intriguing, Mr Speaker, that the members opposite have just been through an estimates committee process and at no stage whatsoever was any question asked about this matter.
Ms Follett: I am asking you now.
MR KAINE: Why did you not ask it during the Estimates Committee? That is what the Estimates Committee process is for - so that you can elicit information about the estimates. But you did not do it then. And, giving due credit to Mr Moore, if he had not raised the question now it would have escaped you completely; it would have absolutely escaped your notice. So now we get to the final stages of the debate on the Appropriation Bill and up gets little Topsy over here and pursues an issue that Mr Moore has raised on the basis that she might just make a political point or two out of it.
It is rather interesting that her exposition of what the Treasurer's Advance is about put it in very simple terms - so simple that I expect that she does not really understand what the purpose of the Treasurer's Advance is anyway. The information is in the budget papers, if any of you had bothered to read them, or if you had bothered to ask the question during the estimates debate. I submit that you have done neither. You did not read the budget papers; nor did you ask the questions.
The fact is that the basic provision for the Treasurer's Advance this year is the same as it was last year, $10m. The extra $3.8m there is for specific purposes, and it may be of interest to you - although I doubt it - to know that some of that extra money is in expectation of receiving money from the Commonwealth for an Aboriginal advancement program, but we do not know yet what the details of the grant from the Commonwealth are going to be. We cannot anticipate what we are going to be expected to spend it on. The only way we can handle it is to put it in the Treasurer's Advance until we can determine how it must be allocated across the budget.
This demonstrates how little you understood about the budget and the fact that you had no interest in this whatsoever until Mr Moore rightfully raised the question.
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