Page 2740 - Week 09 - Thursday, 26 August 1993
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Surely that is what we are talking about from a management viewpoint - to be able to put a dollar value up front that says, "We expect that this function is going to cost us X million dollars or X thousand dollars or X hundreds of thousands of dollars through the course of the year". If we are not doing that, then we are not doing our estimating properly.
I simply commend to the Government that they consider very carefully some of these factors which are said to be beyond the control of management. There are two aspects to this. It is not beyond the ability of management to forecast them, to estimate them. It may be beyond their ability on a day-to-day operating basis to control them. They are two different things. I would urge the Government to consider whether it is not better, from their viewpoint, from a political viewpoint, to put forward a budget that accurately represents the expected outcome, rather than one that, in effect, deliberately understates it. When you put forward a budget that, on the face of it, deliberately understates the expected outcome you are attracting criticism. At the end of the day, if it is not us, somebody out there will say, "Why can you not produce a budget and then live with it?".
I think it would be sensible for the Government to think about the figure they have put into their Appropriation Bill for health and see whether they do not have enough information and add a quantum to it to cover the contingency, if you like, of the likely outcome of these functions. It is very easy to say, "They are beyond our control. Therefore we will not attempt to estimate them and we will not attempt to manage them". I think something more than that is required of management and, that being so, the Government is part of the management process and I think something more than that is required of government.
I think it is fair to say that in the last three years the health organisation has done a good job of pulling up their standards of performance. I think they are performing much better now than they were three years ago, as perhaps other agencies of government are too. Having an Assembly here to which they are directly responsible now, as opposed to the situation that existed four years ago, they are becoming more aware that they are under close scrutiny. They are doing their best to lift their game in terms of estimating and management of their budget, and I have no real criticism of them. We have learned a great deal about it. They acknowledged that in almost every area we looked at there was room for further improvement; that, because of financial constraints or because of constraints in human resource terms or for some other reason, they had not yet been able to pull themselves up to where even they would like to be. I do not think you can be critical of an organisation that is doing its best within its resources to lift its game. I think the health organisation is. But we did make it clear to them that in another year or so from now the Public Accounts Committee would like to have another look at how they are going and see whether they are continuing to improve their performance.
I said at the beginning that we were not looking to be political about this, we were not looking to be able to say to the Government, "You failed". But I think there is a message in there that, just as the health organisation is taking very seriously the need to improve their performance, so the Government has an obligation to be part of that and to satisfy the Assembly and the community at large that the very large amounts of money that are spent on health delivery in the Territory are being properly spent and that we are getting the best return for our money. I commend the report to the Assembly.
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