Page 3120 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 September 1993
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In other words, if these reports are not timely there is no point in producing them at all. We were expecting some sort of commitment from the Treasury and from the Government that these reports would be produced in a timely fashion.
A matter of great public debate these days, certainly within Australia and I am sure elsewhere, is the question of accrual accounting. The Auditor-General concluded that opportunities exist for the ACT to move more swiftly to accrual reporting in comparison to the Commonwealth and most other State and Territory governments. That is a statement with which I would totally agree. When it came to finding out from the Treasury what their intentions were in connection with accrual accounting - this is not a new debate; it has been going on for years - there seemed to be a certain amount of ambivalence about when all this was going to happen.
For example, we were disturbed to note that the submission from the Treasury puts the expected compliance date with the proposed accounting standard for public sector departmental reporting as being four to five years away. Why? Why is it taking so long to pick up an accounting standard that has been agreed across Australia in terms of universal and uniform accounting standards? We are still talking about four or five years from now before we might do it - not we will, but we might. Our report states:
The Committee sees the transition to accrual accounting for all public sector activities as a particularly important issue and views with concern comments of Treasury officials during the hearings that further development of the Exposure Draft et cetera was awaited before the ACT would progress further.
We are unclear as to what that means. In other words, we have no idea of the timetable that the Government or the Treasury is working to. The committee expressed quite strongly our opinion that the ACT Treasury should be taking a more active role rather than a passive role in the development of improved financial management and reporting tools for the ACT public sector. Why do we need to wait to see what has happened elsewhere? We have a fairly small, tightly knit government sector, and it should be possible here to move much more quickly than perhaps is the case elsewhere.
There are some genuine concerns on the part of the committee that perhaps the Treasury is not as enthusiastic about some of these improvements - I use the word advisedly - in the way that government maintains and produces its accounts and presents its reports, particularly the latter, with all of its financial reports being in such a format that they can be readily related one to the other so that you can see what is going on, so that you can see how the Government is dealing with the money that is appropriated for its purposes. The committee sees that as an important development, one where, in some respects, we are lagging behind the rest of the country instead of being in front of them.
I commend the report to the Assembly and I would ask the Government to consider seriously the matters raised by the Auditor-General and our comment in connection with those matters. The committee will be reviewing these matters again in the future and we would like to see an indication of rather more commitment and dedication to achieving some beneficial change than we have had presented to us in the past.
Debate (on motion by Ms Ellis) adjourned.
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