Page 3083 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 17 November 1992
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Mr Connolly: Mr Cornwell did a very good job, covering for all of you.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! Mr Kaine has the floor.
MR KAINE: There were Liberals present on the day the final report was considered, but there were three Labor members who were not there. So do not let us have any of this hypocrisy about who was and who was not at meetings.
Madam Speaker, I simply reiterate that this is an excellent report. It is the result of a very rigorous review of the Government's estimates. It makes a number of very important recommendations which I hope some of the Ministers will look at seriously before they come back with their budget next year, assuming that they are still there to bring down the budget next year. I suspect that some of them will not be. By the time the Cabinet has been restructured there will be one or two who will not be there next year, but we will see. For them to suggest that the chairperson of this committee somehow has acted improperly, or that any other member of it has acted improperly, is something that they ought to be ashamed of. Let us recognise the fact that this year, as with the three previous years in the life of this Assembly, the Estimates Committee process has been properly conducted; that the chairperson has acted properly and that the other members of this Assembly have acted properly. Let us accept the results and get on with it, not try to hedge, not try to get off the hook and somehow say that the report is invalid because we were not there on the day that the final report was considered. That is a cop-out, and it is a deliberate cop-out, Madam Speaker.
MR LAMONT (8.40): I rise to pay a genuine compliment to the chair of the Estimates Committee. I do so because, as I chair a committee of this Assembly, I am aware of the pressures which are placed on chairs of committees to try to meet the competing needs of the members of the committee, the workload that you are required to get through, and the requirement to follow due and proper process. The Estimates Committee this year was marked by a genuine spirit of cooperation in relation to the conduct of the questioning. Members did not, as happened in previous years, interject and override each other. A great deal of decorum was exercised - - -
Mrs Grassby: You must have been at a different meeting than I was.
MR LAMONT: A great deal of decorum was exercised by all members of the committee when I was in attendance, Mrs Grassby. I found it a quite proper process for non-executive members of this Assembly to scrutinise the budget documents; to have before them the responsible Minister, and those responsible government employees, and to investigate the appropriateness of the administrative arrangements and financial arrangements which exist in the ACT public sector.
There was much debate, both in the formal processes of the committee and informally in discussions in the corridor, about the most appropriate way to deal with particular issues as far as the Estimates Committee was concerned. In fact, some of that debate took place prior to the Estimates Committee being formally established. We were quite aware that it was going to take a quite significant effort on the part of individuals, and particularly the chair and secretariat, to arrive at a report which, in general, is worthy of the support of this Assembly, for the committee has investigated a range of specific issues and it kept up that line of questioning throughout most of the hearings.
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