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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 785 ..

Mr Berry: It did not blow out.

Mrs Carnell: It did. He put $14m in up front.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Humphries has the floor.

MR HUMPHRIES: I will educate Mr Berry. The budgets I am talking about are the 1990-91 budget, the 1991-92 budget, the 1992-93 budget, and now the 1995-96 budget. They are the four budgets I am talking about which have blown out.

Mr Berry: It does not matter.

MR HUMPHRIES: It does not matter? Millions of dollars do not matter, says Mr Berry. The question I pose to Mr Moore - I hope that he will listen to me because he was present throughout those four budgets blowing out - is this: Why is Mrs Carnell being censured when none of the other three Ministers responsible were censured for their budget blow-outs? It is true that Mrs Carnell promised higher standards in budget accounting - - -

Mr Moore: And promised to fix it - - -

MR HUMPHRIES: And promised to fix it. Then again, so did I in 1989; so did Mr Berry when I blew out my budget in 1990; so did I again in 1991 when his budget blew out; so did Mr Connolly when he took over from Mr Berry. He criticised Mr Berry for his handling of budget matters, and so did Mrs Carnell. Why is Mrs Carnell the first to suffer from this new standard?

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Minister for Health and Community Care) (12.28): One of the interesting things about Mr Moore's amendment is that this is the first time it could have happened, because this is the first time any Health Minister has ever made the information available on a monthly basis. The reality is that the reason it has never happened before is that no other Health Minister has ever come clean. It is interesting to be censured for providing information to the Assembly. We have made very clear, the whole way through this year, exactly where the health budget is up to. In all of our reports we have explained where it is up to, why it is there, where the cost pressures are, and, hopefully, what we were planning to do about it. All that information has been made available every single month. As nobody else had ever done that, I suppose that it came as a bit of a surprise to Assembly members.

The other thing, of course, is that the level of information now available to the Government and to the Assembly on the health budget is about four million times better than it was, say, when Mr Humphries was Minister, when it was very difficult, really, to determine where the health budget was up to. We know where it is up to now; but, certainly, there is no doubt that the level of management still leaves an awful lot to be desired, despite the sorts of things we have done in just 12 months to try to bring this whole situation back under control. This situation was not produced just this year; it has existed every single year.

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