Page 4091 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 24 November 1993
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Mr Berry: No two quarters are the same.
MR KAINE: Madam Speaker, could you ask this Minister to pipe down? I am talking to the Treasurer - through you, of course.
MADAM SPEAKER: I will call him to order, Mr Kaine.
MR KAINE: Mr Berry clearly does not understand what I am talking about anyway, so he does not have to prattle on the way that he does. I accept the Treasurer's undertaking and commitment to the Assembly that she is accountable. Well, I would like her to be. I would like to know more than what is contained in this document about the ACT Borrowing and Investment Trust Account because it tells me nothing. It just gives me a bundle of figures that have no relevance to the original estimate, and the Chief Minister, who says that she is accountable to this Assembly, does not even bother to try to explain to us why the figures are as they are. In other words, there is no accountability; there is not even information, because what is there is useless.
Madam Speaker, the Public Accounts Committee has taken a reference to look at the way the Government maintains its accounts and the form of the reporting that it presents to the Assembly and the public. The Treasurer might understand why. These documents have no meaning whatsoever. They convey no information. They differ from other documents that are presented at the same time. The Minister for Health's statement does not coincide with what is stated in this document. Which one is correct, or is neither of them correct? Is, in fact, the blow-out $6m and not $3m? We do not know, because this document does not tell us. We are relying on the Minister for Health to tell us what is actually going on, and he knows, and everybody else knows, that we have had to prise information out of him. It is like getting him into a dentist's chair and getting at him with a pair of forceps. Otherwise we would not even be getting the periodic activity reports that we are getting now. We are getting them only because the Assembly insisted that he provide them, and he resisted strenuously for months, even after we passed the motion requiring him to do so.
It simply is not good enough. The documents convey no information. There is no sense of accountability on the part of the Treasurer or anybody else in tabling this kind of information, or this kind of misinformation or non-information. I would like to see some amplification of some of this information that is contained in here, so that I can understand what it is trying to tell me. Presumably it is trying to tell me something.
MR BERRY (Minister for Health, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (3.37): Madam Speaker, I would like to correct something that Mr Kaine said. He said, "Mr Berry had to be dragged kicking and screaming - - -
Mr Kaine: You did. You provided it only in response to a motion from this Assembly obliging you to do it.
Mr Humphries: Has he sought leave to make this statement, Madam Speaker?
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! There is a motion before us, Mr Humphries.
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