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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 2169 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

unexpected outcomes. We had a $60m surplus one year because on the one hand they had underexpended by $30m and on the other they had had windfall profits of $30m. Then they said, "Didn't we do a great job with the budget". In my estimation, that is evidence of poor management of the budget. It is poor management on two counts. First, you did not know what your revenues were going to be. You understated them by $30m in one area alone - land revenue. Secondly, this Assembly appropriated money for expenditure on capital and other works and you failed to spend it. The then Treasurer came in here and said, "Didn't we manage the budget beautifully. At the end of the year we had $60m more than we thought we were going to have".

The former Speaker, whose experience in budgetary management is zero, now tells us what a terrible job this Government has done in preparing the budget. I do not agree. The budget was prepared in a climate in which all the reserves of the Territory had been spent by the previous Government. In fact, in February of this year the amount of money remaining in the Territory's Consolidated Fund was zero. This is the party that claims expertise in financial management. Our reserves were totally exhausted. We were placed in the position where we had to try to get expenditures down because Commonwealth revenues continue to decline. We were forced to consider whether we were going to cut expenditure, push taxes above the levels that apply anywhere else in Australia or increase our borrowing.

What do you do? The answer is that you cut the expenditure side of the budget. Any sensible Treasurer would do that. If the previous Treasurer had faced up to that simple concept over each of the last five years, we would not have been in the position that we are in today. There was no substantive reduction of the expenditure side of the budget under the previous Government in any of the five years. The Estimates Committee this year looked at a budget that was framed in an adverse situation created by five years of Labor mismanagement. There is no question about that. If we are going to place blame for any shortcomings in this year's budget, let us place it where it belongs.

I do not think that the budget suffers from all of the deficiencies that the chair of the Estimates Committee alleged. The committee made 35 recommendations, but most of them have to do with the process of budgetary development and the kinds of information that the members of this Assembly - this new Assembly was elected only in February - would like to see in budget papers. Interestingly, that is a process that has happened every year since self-government. Every Estimates Committee has said, "We would like to see different information. We would like to see information presented in a different way. We would like more of it". What happened this year is no different to what has happened in previous years. It does not reflect a deficiency in the budget. It is simply a measure of the changing expectations of members of this Assembly and what they want to see. Most of the recommendations are of that kind. I do not see the massive discrepancy in quality or the massive problem with the budget that the Estimates Committee chair just spent 20 minutes outlining. They simply are not there.

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