Page 3107 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 17 November 1992
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If members are aware of a breach of privilege and have not done that, they ought not to have any more to say about it.
In terms of the report as a whole, Madam Speaker, it seems to me that a range of issues have been raised and dealt with by members. I will deal with only one issue, that of ACTEW appearing before the Estimates Committee. I would like, first of all, to thank the Minister for offering to bring ACTEW before the committee. I think it is a very good precedent that has been set. It is a recommendation of the Estimates Committee that in future ACTEW should provide the same information in the same format as departments have done. The procedure for looking at the ACTEW budget will therefore be very similar to that for government departments. What happened was that very late on a Friday evening, I think it was - it was certainly very late one evening - we decided that we would bring the ACTEW people before us instead of having them come back again at another time.
In fact, if I recall correctly, we spent something like an hour-and-a-half with ACTEW, asking questions. I feel that in many ways we did it inadequately. We look at Ministers and how well they perform, and it does not hurt us to look at how well we perform in the Estimates Committee. I hope that next year we will ensure that we look at ACTEW much more carefully and ask them to work through their budget to the $50,000 level, as we have with other departments. For ACTEW, in some areas that will be difficult. No doubt it will take two or three years to finetune, so that we are not asking the public servants who work for ACTEW, and other public servants, to spend an inordinate number of hours getting down to detail that is not really necessary. That does happen in some situations, and it is something that we need to finetune and be aware of.
It is with pleasure that I support this report. I emphasise that, apart from some small criticisms, the vast majority of us appreciate what the Ministers and the public servants did. For those of us who have sat on previous estimates committees, the vast majority of the information was significantly better, significantly franker, significantly easier to understand than in previous years. In fact, that made some of the questioning that went on in previous years quite redundant this year because we had the answers in front of us. I think that is an important part of the process.
As far as the process goes, I personally think that next year we should consider the possibility of dealing in depth with just one or two sections of each department and not worrying about the rest of the department, thus cutting down the time for public servants, the time for Ministers and the time for ourselves. That requires a different thinking in terms of the Estimates Committee - that we are not going to look at absolutely everything. The important part of the process is done before the public servants arrive in front of the Estimates Committee. Most of us recognise that the discipline that has been required gives the public servants the opportunity to look at what they are doing, to assess their performance, where they can, against performance indicators, and to be prepared to provide the information to the Estimates Committee. I think that is a process we ought to consider for the next Estimates Committee. I commend the report to the Assembly.
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