Page 1794 - Week 06 - Thursday, 19 May 1994
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SUPPLY BILL 1994-95
Debate resumed from 12 May 1994, on motion by Ms Follett:
That this Bill be agreed to in principle.
MR KAINE (4.32): Normally one can say that there is nothing very remarkable about supply Bills, and convention suggests that oppositions should pass them. Therefore, one could assume that they are fairly non-controversial documents. As has been the case with previous supply Bills put forward by our present Treasurer, however, with this Bill that is not the case. There are some interesting things about the Bill, which was tabled only a week ago, that I would like to deal with today because I think that they should not go unremarked upon.
The first thing that I think I ought to comment on is the quantum of the amount that is being asked for by the Government for supply. The Chief Minister made the point in her tabling speech that what we need is simply an amount of money sufficient to tide the Government over until the Appropriation Bill is passed. Of course, the Appropriation Bill overtakes the Supply Bill, and the Government then has sufficient money to carry out its business for the next year. She commented that there are some special factors that need a little bit of padding over and above what you would normally assess to be the expenditure required for this notional period until the Appropriation Bill is passed.
Last year we had a five-month supply period. It was not expected that the Appropriation Bill would be passed until November, so we had to provide the Government with sufficient money to last for almost half of its fiscal year. The amount appropriated in the Supply Bill was $640m in round figures. This year the Government reasonably expects the budget to be passed in August, so we are really talking about only a two-month period. If the budget is likely to be, in round figures, $1.2 billion, then the Supply Bill for that two-month period ought to be for, say, $200m. But what do we ask for? We ask for over two-and-a-half times that. We ask for $516m in round figures. There must be some fairly substantial one-off, unexpected items of expenditure to warrant building the amount up from - let us give them a little bit of a margin - $300m to over $500m. Once again, as has been the case in previous years, it is difficult to reconcile the amount of money being sought by the Government in their Supply Bill and what one would reasonably expect to be required. The amount being sought is much more.
I wonder whether that is not the kind of thing that led to the comment by Arthur Andersen, in connection with the health organisation, that there seems to be a presumption that there is a bottomless pit of money. When the Government seeks the approval of the Assembly to provide $500m or more to do what you would expect $200m to do, would that not lead people to suggest that perhaps the Government has plenty of money and that there is no real problem, because we will just provide $500m to operate the business of government for two months? That is essentially what these documents and the tabling speech by the Treasurer suggest.
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