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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1164 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

This is crunch time for this Government. The committee's conclusions about the health budget are deadly serious. Mrs Carnell is free to bring in new procedures, new accounting processes, new contracts for staff; but now she has one responsibility only, and that is to convince us - without name-calling, posturing or calling us all things that we would rather not be called, and calling for our support - on some objective basis, through cold, hard argument and factual reasoning, that she is able to draw sufficient respect from her department to have them implement the changes that are needed to draw the health budget into line. The committee's concerns are grave, and we expect an equally grave and considered response.

MR KAINE (11.07): Mr Speaker, in many respects, as a committee report, this is a rather strange one. As the chair of the Estimates Committee has noted, there is not a dissenting report; there is a dissenting opinion. That was quite deliberate. It is a dissenting opinion because the report consists of nothing but opinion. It comes up with no recommendations. Even the conclusions are indeterminate. The Assembly has before it a report which suggests no course of action that the Assembly should take in connection with the Appropriation Bill. It does express nothing but opinion, and that is precisely the reason why my dissenting document was a dissenting opinion.

Ms McRae says that this is simply a request to spend an additional $14.2m. It is partly true, but it is an incomplete statement. It is a request for approval to spend an additional $14.2m on the health function, quite explicitly. There is some suggestion in the report that this money might not be spent on health; it might be spent on other things. But the Appropriation Bill is quite explicit; it is asking for additional money to be spent in the health budget. It seeks to increase the health budget by $14.2m. The Government, when this Bill is passed - as, I submit, it will be - has no mandate to spend the money on anything else. Yet the report raises questions about whether or not the money can be spent on other things. I submit, Mr Speaker, that it cannot. The purpose of this additional Appropriation Bill is quite explicit.

Since the committee, as I said, has come up with no recommendations and only conclusions which in themselves are vague and indeterminate - and I will come to that in a minute - it seems strange that more than half of this report deals not with the estimates which the committee was asked to consider but with the process by which the Government brought this matter to the Assembly. The general argument seems to be that it is somehow wrong because it is different; it is not what people did before and, therefore, it is somehow wrong. In trying to define how it is wrong, at some places in the report words like "necessary" are used. Was it necessary? In other cases they have used the word "appropriate". Is it appropriate?

In one case the committee got darned close to suggesting that it might have been unlawful. They did not say that, but they did state that the previous process that was used was lawful. What they did not say was that this process is also lawful. It seems that it has been left hanging and the implication seems to be that, because the process formerly used was lawful, this one is unlawful. I submit, in the strongest terms, that simply to suggest that it might be unnecessary or inappropriate is no basis for a criticism of the Government, because, in my view, it is quite appropriate; necessity is a matter of opinion; and there is nothing that suggests that it is unlawful.

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