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The Greens are criticised quite a lot for talking about process as if it is way off the main game. What is process? Process is the means by which we achieve the ends. How we arrive at decisions plays a fundamental role in the types of decisions we ultimately make and the success or failure of implementing those decisions, so we want to change the process. We do not want to be presented with a black box budget one day and two days later be expected to endorse it in principle.

Mrs Carnell claims that this budget is about management and not politics. We believe that this is a rather naive and dangerous statement. This budget is loaded with ideology, and that is hardly surprising. We all have ideology. The politics behind this budget are similar to the politics behind nearly every budget brought down in this country in the last 10 years. Whether they are Labor budgets or Liberal budgets, they always look much the same. These are not two radically different parties that tout radically different policies. Rather, they are two very similar parties that shout radically different rhetoric.

Throughout the 1980s Australia internationalised most of its economy, reduced protection to local industry and deregulated most of the financial system. In pursuit of competition, we have lost control of vast chunks of our local and national economies to outside interests. The Greens are not opposed to internationalism. The Greens are opposed to an internationalism that ignores our environment and social justice and leaves us at the mercy of international markets. To switch our economy around to serve people and not some abstract economic machine will require long-term coherent planning for industry, for jobs, for social policy, and for the environment. Michael Kirby, in “Trash Fights Back”, sums it up well as follows:

We may, according to some, be ready to throw off the old Empire from our flag, but we seem to have become colonies of a new imperialism. It is an imperialism of international economists who have disdained Keynes and Galbraith and delivered a very poor social substitute. These economists rule. Their governors are at Moody's, their merest edict is uttered in eerie monosyllabic injunctions - AAA and the colonies smile. Take away the merest A, and the colonies tremble.

It is these underlying market philosophies that have created the national benchmarking systems, and it is these national benchmarks that both major parties use in formulating their budgets. It is the Commonwealth Grants Commission report on general relativities that we so heavily rely on when we talk about making changes. How many of the people in this Assembly, the members of the media, the public servants preparing the budget and other interested parties have studied, understood and debated these benchmarks? We all appear to accept blindly these so-called relativities for fear of looking as though we do not know what we are talking about. We say, “Mm, yes, it says so in the Commonwealth Grants Commission report”. It is the Commonwealth that believes that we are spending too much money in the areas of health and education; yet in education, for example, it appears that it is because of our above-average expenditure that we have such a high Years 11 and 12 retention rate.

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