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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 2166 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

However, Mrs Carnell kept emphasising that the bottom line would not change. In fact, detailed questioning revealed many instances of how that bottom line could change because the ACT budget is so dependent on other factors. Nobody has shied away from that. I am not suggesting that that information was not given to us, but there is room for changes because nothing is set in concrete. It is a little disappointing when it is touted as a three-year budget and quite clearly it is a one-year budget with two years of forward estimates and a few wish lists and a few bottom lines written in. It does not really help us terribly much in the end. We have asked that future papers include further detail for the outyears, showing in particular the detail and depth of cuts so that we can assess their impact.

After extensive questioning we were told that the cuts were associated with efficiency measures and with changes. We were told, "We have to do better than this. We will outsource. The Government is paying too much or the Government does not know how much it is paying. If only you understood, then you would be on our side". I am afraid that we did not understand. There was no detail. We expect far better from something that is supposed to be a three-year budget. We have asked for better accuracy, better details of the outyears, better details of cuts in Budget Paper No. 2 and Budget Paper No. 3 and a far better set of performance indicators. For six, seven or eight years the people now in government had been saying that the performance indicators were dreadful. Now that they are in government their performance indicators are no better than anybody else's. That is extremely disappointing.

Along with the lack of detail about projected spending and projected saving, there was a disturbing lack of detail about grants, real and actual costs, the cost of accommodation, youth sector performance and outcomes in that particular policy area. Our report makes quite a number of recommendations to try to tidy up that detail. They involve merely superficial changes that I hope the Government will have no problem in implementing.

After giving an overview, our report deals with the substantive issues. Department by department we found where lack of real work had resulted in some pretty shoddy decision-making. Quite clearly, the Government had decided that there was an outcome that they wanted to achieve and that they were going to get to that bottom line helter-skelter in three years so that they could be re-elected as a debt-free, balanced-budget government. That was clearly the objective. There is nothing untoward about that. Every government has a political objective for its budget. Why not? Quite clearly, the re-election plan of Mrs Carnell is to have a borrowing-free, balanced budget in three years' time. If that were the desired outcome you would expect some pretty careful thought along the way about the impact on the various service areas and departments to be hit. As we went through each of the areas we found that no thought had been given to that. Although the budget had been delayed some months, the thinking, the depth of analysis and the explanations were simply not satisfactory. There had been a lot of thinking - that is for sure - about how to get to Mrs Carnell's bottom line. When we analysed the reasons for decisions that were taken, we found that they were very thin.

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