Page 5337 - Week 17 - Thursday, 13 December 1990
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view of the comments that Mr Berry has made in relation to impartiality of committees, Ms Follett may have thought it appropriate to stand down for the period of that particular inquiry.
The point that I am making is that, in fact, a lot of the matters that we looked at within the committee occurred in the period when the chairman of the committee was in fact the responsible Minister. As I said, in relation to the comments that Mr Berry has made about impartiality, I thought it was unfortunate that Ms Follett did not stand down for that period of that particular inquiry.
Ms Follett: You could have moved a motion. You had the numbers.
MR JENSEN: Oh, yes, Ms Follett; but, in my sort of fashion of operating in committees in a bipartisan approach - which is the way that I normally propose to operate within committees, despite what Mr Berry may consider - I gave you the option, Ms Follett, knowing full well that I would have been able to make these comments this evening.
One of the main issues for me on this matter was how the proposal was to be funded. Was it to be funded on budget or through the SAAP program? If the former, was it, in fact, included in the budget? If it was for SAAP, the timing of the agreement on joint programming meant that a punt, in fact, had to be taken on the availability of the funds.
Therefore, the question for me was: were the funds allocated in division 170 of the 1989-90 Budget Appropriation Bill outside of the SAAP application? It is clear that the division 170 allocation certainly included an amount for SAAP. There is no doubt about that. That is not a problem. When the calculations were being done by the Follett Government, the problem was, in fact, whether it was likely that the funds for that particular program were going to come out of the money that was being allocated out of the budget or out of SAAP. In fact there was no clear evidence available to the committee.
There is no doubt, in fact, that the Treasury was technically correct in its response to the Estimates Committee. It can depend on the question that was asked. For example, was the refuge included in the process which identified the amount, less the SAAP program funds, yet to be broken down and agreed to by the ACT and Federal Health Ministers, or was it designed to always come out of the SAAP funding program? No information, unfortunately, was available to formally clarify the question. Therefore, as Ms Follett has indicated, the committee decided that there was no point in conducting a witch-hunt. It is not a legal problem, but it is an issue worth looking at, nonetheless, even if only to clarify the legitimate concerns of Mr Collaery in relation to a couple of matters.
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