Page 3921 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
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MR CONNOLLY: Borrowing, loan raising - six of one and half a dozen of the other. Madam Speaker, he proposes to do that by inserting in proposed new subsection 18(6), which sets out the purposes of the Home Loan Trust Account - that is important; that is the account - that money will be raised within limits set by the Treasurer. That is superfluous. That account, whose purposes are set out at proposed new subsection 18(6), is established in the new subsection (2), which says that there shall be an account named the Home Loan Trust Account established by the Treasurer as a trust account under subsection (2) of section 85 of the Audit Act. So, that references you into that whole Audit Act accountability provision.
It then says that "the Treasurer shall maintain those accounts under that section". So, the Act already provides that the Treasurer maintains the Home Loan Trust Account, and it is the Home Loan Trust Account through which our loan raising activities will occur. So, the amendment is superfluous. If the Liberals wanted some accountability mechanism to the Assembly, they could have moved that, but what they have moved does not do that at all. All it says is that the Treasurer can set limits. The Treasurer could set a limit of $20 billion and you, presumably, would say, "Shock, horror!".
Mr Cornwell: And be accountable accordingly, sir.
MR CONNOLLY: She is accountable because the account, as it is set up, is an Audit Act account, and the Treasurer is statutorily charged with the responsibility of maintaining that account. So, your political responsibility is there.
Madam Speaker, Mr Cornwell also was trying to weave a web to suggest that somehow we have been less than open about what we were doing in our borrowings. He said that the only reference he could find was in the Budget Overview. If he had turned to page 167 of Budget Paper No. 3, Program Information and Estimates 1992-93, which is the substantial budget paper, he would have found this statement:
Home Loan Trust Account
This trust account exists to account for the provision of home loans to low income earners through new off-budget funding arrangements being introduced in 1992-93.
That is these proposals. There we have it set out. In the column for 1991-92, under "Actual", there is nothing. That is not surprising as it is a new provision to be introduced. The 1992-93 estimate, a loan through ACTBIT, is $18,975,000. The total capital shown is $19,000,000. The ACTBIT loan which we propose to raise is the main one, as we say, and ACTBIT will raise that through the private sector. It will then on-loan it to home buyers. "Off budget", Madam Speaker - I say this again - does not mean not in the budget papers, because there it is at page 167. "Off budget" is a form of shorthand that we use, and indeed every other State uses, to mean that the source of the funds that we are putting into these home programs comes from the private sector. They are not raised through the current revenue.
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