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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1183 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

In the past governments have avoided the intense scrutiny of a supplementary estimates committee process by adopting the much easier cash management approach to budget overruns. I was fully aware of this in supporting a second appropriation. I was also fully aware that it meant allowing unprecedented scrutiny of the Government's budget management. The Estimates Committee is the mechanism that allows the Assembly that scrutiny and it is therefore astonishing that the Estimates Committee should come down with a report that says that such scrutiny should not have occurred. Fancy an estimates committee, Mr Speaker, coming down and saying, "We did not want to scrutinise this. We did not want to ask you questions. We think you should have just signed it off."! I am absolutely stunned that a committee of this Assembly would ever report that they did not want the information, that they did not want the level of scrutiny, that they did not want the transparency. That is effectively what the majority of committee members concluded when they said that they were not convinced that there was a need for a second appropriation, and therefore the supplementary estimates process, in their view, obviously, should not have gone ahead.

Setting aside political differences for a moment, it is important that all members of this Assembly recognise the value of the estimates committee process. We certainly do on this side. I must admit, Mr Speaker, that I believe that every member of this Assembly would be very pleased at having the opportunity to ask the relevant Minister and the senior officials whatever questions they wanted to ask on such a significant budget change as this one. It is extremely unfortunate, Mr Speaker, that the estimates committee process has been undermined and politicised to such an extent that an estimates committee has actually disputed the need for detailed scrutiny of a major budget overrun.

Mr Speaker, I am absolutely stunned at the comments that were made by Ms McRae and Mr Berry. Somehow Ms McRae does not think we were clear enough that we were going to spend $14.2m more on health. If she was not clear on that, maybe she should have read the title of the Appropriation Bill, which made it very clear that this $14.2m will be spent on health. In fact, if she had looked at the monthly reports that we make available, unlike under previous governments under which such things were not available, she would have seen right from July last year that the problems in health were accumulating. The fact is that we have already spent a significant amount of that $14.2m as well.

We also made extremely clear, Mr Speaker, in my opening statement for the Estimates Committee, exactly how the money had been spent, what the cost pressures had been in health, where we had not achieved on a line-by-line basis the sorts of savings that we had hoped to achieve, and where we had spent more than we expected on a line-by-line basis. All of that information was brought forward, but did I get many questions on that? No. None of those opposite seemed to be overly interested in the health budget and what was actually happening. They were much more interested, supposedly, in arguing that they should not be sitting there at all; that they should not really be having an estimates committee approach; that they should not really be placed in a position of having to experience this open government or transparent approach; that they really seriously wanted me to go away and sign off a document that potentially could end up being debated in the Assembly. We all know that a debate in the Assembly is about "We said this and you said that". It is certainly not about the level of scrutiny that an estimates committee procedure actually gives to all of those opposite.

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