Page 3118 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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It is totally unrelated and has nothing to do with the budget and reports tabled yesterday by the Government. The committee, no doubt, will look at those at some future time. Our report deals with the Government's accounting and its reporting up until June last year, which was what the Auditor-General's report No. 5 of 1992 was about.
The committee was greatly interested in what the Auditor-General had to say. Anybody who has been a member of this Assembly for any length of time will know how difficult it is sometimes to take a budget and the subsequent reports of progress that relate to that budget and make any sense out of them. The reports have different formats and do not necessarily relate to the original budget so that it is possible to see what on earth is going on. There has been some criticism, in the course of various estimates committees over the last two to three years, that the information is presented in different formats; it is hard to reconcile it; and it is very difficult to see how the Government is managing the money that has been appropriated for its purposes. So we were greatly interested in what the Auditor-General had to say about the form and format of the Government's accounting and its reports.
The Auditor-General made a number of recommendations which we believe are of value and which we would like the Government to look at and take on board. We did look at one or two particular things to inform ourselves, particularly in light of what is happening elsewhere in the world in terms of government accounting and the form, format and content of the way government accounts are maintained and reported. We looked at a number of different aspects of what the Auditor-General had to say.
I would have to say, Madam Speaker, that the committee, by and large, was disappointed at the Treasury response to what the Auditor-General had to say. We found that the submission from the Treasury, which we sought through the Treasurer, was lacking in any detail. One had to wonder whether Treasury officials had really examined what the Auditor-General had to say and whether they took it seriously; whether they considered that there was anything for them to learn from what the Auditor-General had to say in his comments on their performance. We found that there was a seeming disregard on the part of the Treasury for giving any priority to these matters. There was no timeframe that they could place on when they intended to look at their accounting systems and their practices, their budget preparation and the like. I would urge the Government to have a close look at what the Auditor-General has said and perhaps generate a little bit of enthusiasm on the part of the Treasury for pursuing some of these matters in more detail.
On the question of budget paper presentation - a subject that has been discussed in this Assembly and in its committees, particularly the Estimates Committee, over the years - we thought that the Auditor-General was making some pertinent comments about the way the budget was presented. If his views were at least considered by the Government - not necessarily implemented, but given due regard - then the format of the budget in future years might be a little bit better, a little bit more comprehensible. It might be more easily readable. We were concerned on that particular aspect that the Treasury did not seem to be able to give us any indication of where the Government was going on this matter.
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