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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 2165 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

I would like to begin by thanking everyone who was involved, in particular the Assembly staff, who, as usual and as has come to be expected in this Assembly, performed their task with excellence and diligence. I have never had the opportunity to experience it at first hand before. I echo the sentiments of everyone in this chamber that I have often heard expressed and say how grateful I am that we have excellent staff who performed their task with care and persistence to help produce what I think is an excellent report. Secondly, I would like to thank all the bureaucrats who came and the Ministers and all who were involved. Estimates, by their very nature, are a very laboured, detailed, lengthy and tiresome process. I think we all came through it relatively unscathed. There were not too many black eyes in the process. On behalf of all the committee, I thank those who participated.

This year, with the changeover to a new government, there were a whole series of challenges that no estimates committee has really faced before. They led to a quite large number of recommendations which I think are really only one-offs. I sincerely hope that that is the case. The major difficulty that we encountered was that the combination of a new government and two sets of Administrative Arrangements Orders plus the tabling of annual reports the day before the Estimates Committee began meant that the information at hand made it extremely difficult to compare current budgets with past budgets. The changes to the government finance statistics format exacerbated the difficulties. In spite of all of that, we soldiered on.

The recommendations reflect the type of information that we need to take a bit more care with. In particular, this year we felt that very little attention had been paid to tracking previous reports to current budget papers and linking previous information to current budget papers. It was only through the extraordinary skill of Bill Symington that we sorted out which report went with what bit of the budget paper information. The information that we were provided with was trumpeted as being presented in the clearest possible format so that everybody in the street could read it. To a certain extent that objective was achieved, but there were still major problems with the type of information provided. We sincerely hope that the Government will take on board our recommendation that those papers be greatly improved.

We could only commend Budget Paper No. 2 and Budget Paper No. 4. The excellent format of Budget Paper No. 2 was unprecedented. It was an expansion of a small pamphlet that the Follett Government produced that was also an excellent production, but the new one has added to the level of clarity and information. A curious omission was a clear table of the cuts to be imposed on each of the departments, so that the general public could have a better idea of the impact they would have. Another omission was a detailed account of how your money is spent in the Chief Minister's Department. That is no small omission, because the Chief Minister's Department has become a quite large department. We have made a recommendation on that. With those inclusions next year, it will become a far better paper. Budget Paper No. 4 was very detailed and informative, but lacked consistency of information about the outyears. We rapidly found that the three-year construction was merely a series of wish lists. It was saying, "Well, if everything turns out in the first year, then that is where we will head for the second year. Well, if everything turns out in the second year, that is where we will head in the third year". After detailed questioning we found that really the three-year budget is not much different to forward estimates.

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