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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1524 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

and in others that this Government set out to achieve that slippage, that we set out, somehow, to have a problem with North Watson, or not to be able to go ahead with the Acton-Kingston swap, or all of the other things that caused slippage. That is simply rubbish, Mr Speaker, and they know that it is rubbish; but fact has never been an extremely important thing.

Mr Speaker, there is one other thing I need to speak about. There is no doubt that we are going to spend $14.2m too much in Health this year. There could be a degree of latitude, but it will be very small. There was never any indication that the overspend in Health would be somewhere between $1 and $14.2m, as has been said here. I can guarantee that the overspend in Health will be in the vicinity of $14.2m.

The comments I made in the Estimates Committee about where we could get that money from were quite right. We could get that money from a number of sources. There are still a number of sources we could get the money from; but, as the year is heading to an end, it became very obvious, Mr Speaker, that we could get the whole $14.2m out of capital works. We made it very clear in the Estimates Committee that the underspend in capital works was in that vicinity. In fact, we made it clear on the record that the underspend in capital works was round about $14.2m. We also ran through the underspends that existed in the Treasurer's Advance and in the area of redundancies. We made it quite clear that there was a lot of latitude in those three programs to pick up the $14.2m. Now that there is no doubt that $14.2m will be available just from capital works, I find it difficult to understand why it is so shocking that we should use one of those programs. We made it clear, Mr Speaker, even in the Estimates Committee, that we could have got the whole $14m out of capital works. Then we spoke about other programs that also had some money that had not been allocated at that stage. Mr Speaker, I think we have been totally consistent all the way through this approach.

The bottom line here, Mr Speaker, is yes, we could have used a different approach. We did not have to go to an appropriation Bill. We could have done it the same way previous governments have moved money. We could have taken a bit from here and a bit from there, signed it off and said, "Well, that is all very nice". But I believe that when you have a problem of this significance in a budget, and it is a significant problem, it is important that this Assembly get an opportunity to debate it and to have maximum scrutiny of it. Nobody can doubt that an estimates committee is maximum scrutiny, and the debate in this Assembly, on the Bill, the committee report, and the Government response to the committee report, is about as much scrutiny as you could ever hope for.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, I want to make a personal explanation under standing order 46.

MR SPEAKER: Proceed.

MR WHITECROSS: Mr Speaker, in Mrs Carnell's closing remarks she said that I had misrepresented the situation when I said that it was the Government's position that section 49 of the Audit Act could be used to transfer money where there had been a change in priorities and suggested that that was rather the policy of the Labor Party. I want to put on the record that the Government response to the Select Committee on Additional Estimates says:

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