Page 3328 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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Mr Lamont: Is that what you do in question time?
MR KAINE: That is what we try to do in question time, but when a Minister takes 20 minutes to answer one question it is sometimes a bit difficult to get the information that you are looking for, and it is a bit difficult to make the Minister accountable. That, to me, is what the Estimates Committee process is about; it is about the accountability of the Executive. I believe that by having a longer period to prepare for it - I repeat that it does not necessarily mean that we want Mr Connolly to sit before the committee for six days instead of two - if we are better informed, we can get the information that we wish to elicit from the Minister in two days and much more effectively than we have been able to do in the past. I believe that there are very significant benefits in bringing the budget forward.
I said that I was avoiding putting a timescale on this, but I think in the end I have to. If I had my druthers I think I would like to see the budget brought down in June, before the financial year starts, because that signals to the whole community - the business community, the welfare community, everybody concerned - what the Government's objectives are for the year. They know right from the beginning; they do not have to wait until September to find out. I would like to see the budget passed long before November; perhaps by the end of the September, or something of that order. With our present sitting pattern, if the budget were brought down in the last sitting week in June you would have a break of about seven weeks when the Estimates Committee process could take place. You could still leave two, three or four weeks up front for preparation by members; for them to determine what approach they wanted to take in the Estimates Committee process. You could still have your Estimates Committee process over and done with by the time we came back for our first sitting in August. I think there is a time there when it would be best suited.
Madam Speaker, I have been confining my remarks to the matter of public importance that I put on the agenda, but I would argue, as I have done before, that if we were looking at a five-year financial plan, rather than just an individual budget, we would be doing better. If we had such a system your forward estimates would be much more useful than they are now, because they would be expressing the Government's intentions in a forward period rather than merely an extension of what is happening this year. The other thing about it is that the first year would automatically become your budget, almost, I would suggest, without amendment. You would have a five-year forward plan, and year five would become year four, year three, year two, year one, and then the budget year. If you debate your five-year financial plan every year, by the time that becomes budget year it has been pretty much thrashed to death. Everybody knows what the Government's intentions are. They have a good sense of the order of magnitude of things, and the budget falls off the end. There would not necessarily be such a searching inquiry in the budget year because you have been doing it over the whole five-year forward plan cycle. I suppose that I would argue for changing the system quite dramatically, as I indicated that I would when I was Chief Minister. I hope that I have established to the satisfaction of the members of the Government that there are advantages in bringing the budget down earlier, and they might take note of it for next year and subsequent years.
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