Page 2684 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 1994
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The Committee is concerned that Treasury appears to exhibit a certain lack of enthusiasm and is not acting as a catalyst for change within the ACT Government Service.
We were relating to these things that the Auditor-General had dealt with. We were also concerned about the timetable. At paragraph 2.4 we said:
Overall, the Committee was disappointed by the findings contained in the response by Treasury to the Audit Report, and what it perceives as the outlook for further improvement.
In other words, they did not seem to be particularly keen to move along too rapidly in dealing with some of these issues. We made that point also specifically in connection with accrual accounting. There has been a lot of emphasis on accrual accounting, but one of the things that I have been at pains to try to point out is that accrual accounting is not really what we are talking about. We are talking about a total change in attitude and a total restructuring of the way that government maintains its accounts and reports. Accrual accounting is one almost minor aspect of it. In connection with accrual accounting, in particular, which the Auditor-General commented upon, our comment at paragraph 5.8 of this final report was:
The Committee is disturbed to note that the submission puts the expected compliance date with the proposed accounting standard for public sector departmental reporting as being four to five years away ...
We do not understand why, when there is a draft accounting standard, it cannot be implemented much more quickly than four to five years hence. That indicated to us that there is no great commitment on the part of the Treasury to doing what governments elsewhere have done already in improving the way that they maintain their internal accounts and then report to the legislature and, of course, through it, to the general public.
Those concerns still remain in my mind. This is very much a current issue. It is in no way completed by the Auditor-General having written a report on it and the Public Accounts Committee having reviewed that report. Members will know that the Public Accounts Committee visited New Zealand, which is at the forefront of this kind of change, to see how it works there and how it was accepted by the business community, the public, the welfare sector and the like. For my part, I was most impressed with how far the New Zealand Government had moved and the fact that there was 100 per cent acceptance of the changes that had been made. That indicates to me that there is scope for considerable change here.
The Government, I submit, ought to be looking more closely at what has been achieved in New Zealand. It was initiated, I might say, by a Labour government; so there should be no ideological problem on the part of the Government with what has happened over there. I am not saying that everything that was done was good. We were looking specifically at the public accounting aspects of what they have done; but the nature of the restructuring, which was fundamental to it all, seems to me to be something that we could look at.
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