Page 3922 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 15 December 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
They are accountable; they are in the budget papers. There they are. This is not some throwaway line in the Budget Overview. This is set out at page 167 of Budget Paper No. 3, under a heading "Home Loan Trust Account", which is the account which is required to be established under subsection (2) of the proposed new section headed "Financial arrangements", by the Treasurer, as a section 85 Audit Act trust account, and statutorily maintained by the Treasurer. As for the political responsibility, if you ask, "Is there a Minister who is answerable?", at the end of the day, yes, statutorily there is. The Treasurer is answerable for these proposals. The Treasurer has, of course, published the proposals in the budget papers, saying and explaining that this is the proposal based on new off-budget borrowings to be introduced in this financial year, and we are introducing them.
MR KAINE (Leader of the Opposition) (9.34): Madam Speaker, all I can say to the Minister is, "A good try". That was a lot of words, and they meant nothing. He relies on the fact that in the back of the budget papers there is a reference to this matter, but the budget papers can be changed tomorrow. The budget papers have not taken the same form for any two consecutive years in the last four years. They change from year to year and the information that is in there varies from year to year. For the Minister to say that because it is in there this year it is always going to be there, and it is always going to be a reflection of the Treasurer's approval, is, of course, sheer rubbish. It will go in there only if the Minister and the Treasurer agree that it should go in there. If they do not so agree, it will not be there in next year's budget papers. That is not the mechanism for the Treasurer to authorise a level of loan anyway. That is the first point.
Secondly, Madam Speaker, he says that this is all superfluous because the Treasurer is responsible for maintaining the account. Certainly, the Treasurer is responsible for maintaining the account, but that says nothing about approving loan levels or loan limits. The two things are totally different. They are totally divorced from each other. I keep a bank account, but I do not authorise borrowings. My wife has an interest in that too, and she tells me what I can borrow and what I cannot. So, the two things are totally divorced privately and they are totally divorced in terms of government accounting. It was a good try, but it is totally lacking in persuasion. What he said was totally irrelevant to the point that we are trying to make. We are talking about the Housing Trust raising off-budget borrowings, despite his trying to obfuscate the issue of what "off-budget" means. I know perfectly well what it means and he might do better to try to disambiguate the thing rather than ambiguate it. We want to see some limit imposed by the Treasurer on how much the Housing Trust can borrow.
If you talk about figures being set down in budget papers in some obscure scale at the back, that is not a conscious decision of a Minister to set a borrowing limit. Mr Cornwell has made the point. We saw the shambles that Victoria got into with its borrowing because all sorts of people were borrowing money without their Ministers knowing about it - or so they say now. They say now, "We did not know that we had borrowed more than the global limit set by the Loan Council". Why did they not know? They did not know because all these statutory bodies were borrowing money without the Minister knowing about it.
We are saying to you, Mr Connolly, and to the Treasurer, that we want to put a stop to that and ensure that it is never likely to happen in the ACT. The only way to do it is to prescribe specifically that the Housing Trust can borrow only to limits set by the Treasurer. That is a very reasonable management precaution,
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .