Page 2528 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 23 August 1994
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we asked you to appropriate a year ago", or, "We actually got $30m more revenue than we told you we were going to get. Aren't we great managers?". This is not good management; this is sloppy management. It is sloppy estimating.
What I want to know is: In the amount that we are now being asked to appropriate for this coming year, $1.312 billion, how much are we overappropriating? How much of that is the Government not going to spend by "good management"? Every time they do not spend it, it means that something that the money was appropriated for has not been provided for this community. That is not good management; it is appalling management. So I ask the question again: Of the $1,312m, how much is going to turn out at the end of the year to be unnecessary or, by poor management, not spent on something that today the Government is telling us it needs to provide for this community? On the other side of the coin, are we going to discover at the end of the year that our revenues vastly exceed the estimates that are given to us in here? I do not know - and I do not think the Chief Minister can tell us either - that that is good management.
The third thing that concerns me greatly is the inability of the Government to substantiate many of its claims about its performance. The Auditor-General and the Estimates Committee year after year have commented on the fact that we have no performance indicators that can be relied upon to tell us how the Government is performing. There are a number of recommendations in our report that deal with that. We cannot rely on the predictions. There is no accountability. The Chief Minister just does not want to be accountable. She refuses to be accountable. We cannot verify whether the estimates that are put to us are good, bad or indifferent. We cannot substantiate the performance claims that the Government makes. So is it any wonder, Madam Speaker, that there is a certain amount of scepticism, not only in members of this Assembly when we go before estimates committees, public accounts committees and the like, but in the general public out there, who are entitled to ask the question: Who is managing and why are they managing so badly?
Only a few days ago, we were told that the Government is going to pay VITAB $3m. That is not appropriated in here. Where is the $3m going to come from? Mr Lamont says, "We are going to take it from a reserve". Which reserve? Where is there a reserve with $3m in it that we can simply take the money from and give it to VITAB?
Mr Lamont: I never said that.
MR KAINE: Yes, you did. Mr Lamont is on record as saying that it is coming from a reserve and that it will not cost the taxpayer anything because the TAB is going to pay it back. In the first place, it has to be taken from Consolidated Revenue. There is no reserve there that has in it $3m that is not needed for anything. It is public money, not a freebie. On the other end of the scale, when it is paid back, if it is paid back, by the TAB that will be money that is not available for the purposes for which TAB money has been used, in the public purse, before. So we have this myth about $3m that is just going to appear and is not going to have any effect on our budget. That is rubbish.
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