Page 4424 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
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So, there are a number of points in this budget which have been correctly brought out by the Estimates Committee in a reasonably bipartisan way and which any government should take on board because things are not going to get easier here in the Territory. Really, any government has to prioritise. We do have to identify must-haves rather than can-haves.
MR MOORE (5.39): Mr Speaker, I would like to begin by congratulating all members of the Estimates Committee on what I think was a fine piece of work and a fine report. I think that it was done in, as Mr Stefaniak said, a spirit of bipartisanship. My congratulations go particularly to the chairman who, I think, has had a very difficult job in chairing that Estimates Committee over the last three years. I believe that he has improved his chairing skills substantially in each of those years. I appreciated the appropriate way in which he chaired this particular committee.
Before I start on the areas I was going to talk on, I just take up with Mr Stefaniak a point about public housing that he does not appear to understand. The people who are in public housing and who are paying the full market value of the rent - and that is a quite large proportion, Mr Stefaniak - subsidise the people who are there on a proportion of their salary and who are not paying full market rent. If a profit can be made from the full market rent, then there is, if anything, a cross-subsidy. We are not subsidising them. If there is any subsidy at all, it is in the careful way that our Housing Trust handles those people so that the people who are not paying full market rent are able to remain in their houses. I think it is a very appropriate utilisation of Territory assets.
One issue that I think it is most important to raise is the strategy that was adopted by the Estimates Committee. One of the strategies that were adopted, and one that I took particular interest in, was the request for each program to provide bar graphs of the expenditure. These bar graphs are not to be confused with the sort of graft that goes on in other bars. I certainly do not refer to any legislative bar.
The graphs that I am talking about, Mr Speaker, provided for the committee, at a quick glance, an overview of expenditure at any given time throughout the period that we are examining. It made it very easy for us to identify areas on which we should ask questions. On most occasions the responses on what appeared from the graphs to be overexpenditure were very clearly handled. It was quite clear, I am sure, to people running each program that when they had a graph that showed a major area out of balance they would have to answer questions on that, and they obviously came prepared to do so. I would think that the exercise of asking for those will have an impact on each of the programs.
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