Page 487 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 20 February 1991
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discrepancy meant that we had an excess of money from that project, which could easily have been used, for example, to keep open for a year one of the schools the Government had targeted for closure.
I recognise the difference between a capital budget and a recurrent budget and I realised that this was a capital work. However, having had my attention drawn to that, I then talked to a number of public servants in the department and also to people who had retired. I understand that the standard procedure for estimates is to overestimate.
Mr Berry: It is recurrent practice.
MR MOORE: It is recurrent practice, indeed. One of the most significant things about that is that we ought to understand and accept that overestimating is a logical way to go. If the public servants underestimate, they are in the position where they have to go back to the Government, hat in hand, and say, "We need more money for the project". They would have to go through the process again, which would be a great waste of time. So it is quite reasonable for them to overestimate.
In this case, of course, an overestimate of $500,000 is out of all proportion, although I accept that there are some reasons why this particular situation happened. The normal practice of overestimating means that normally there is going to be some surplus as far as the estimates go. That being the case, it is quite possible for us to establish a huge slush fund which could be spent without appropriate scrutiny.
With that knowledge, it seemed to me that the matter ought to be pursued further. Following a question yesterday to Mr Kaine on this matter, he said that the normal procedure would have to be followed, that the money would not just be spent willy-nilly, that there would have to be a new approach to the Government. That is at odds with a report in the Canberra Times - and with my information, by the way - on 8 January 1991. Having talked to a spokesman for the Minister for Finance and Urban Services, Hugh Lamberton wrote:
The money saved was part of the capital-works program and would have to be spent by the Department of Education on a similar capital project. There was a large back-log of maintenance unable to be funded under the Budget.
It seems to me quite clear that, whilst there is always a possibility of spending money on capital projects, when the budget came down the Government had decided that these were the things it was absolutely necessary to spend the money on this year. If there was money left over, that money could well be returned to general revenue. Rather than being spent on the backlog of maintenance, as was indicated
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