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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1544 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

For the record, I would like to repeat and expand on some of the observations made in September last year about the three-year budget strategy, a strategy that was fundamentally flawed from the beginning. The cracks that are surfacing in the strategy now will continue to spread across it, like a chip on a windscreen. First, you start off with a little thing, and then it spreads out. So the cracks are spreading in Mrs Carnell's three-year budget strategy. It was ambitious or, should I say, rather than ambitious, misleadingly optimistic. It provided a plan that was dependent on too many ifs and buts and assumptions, which meant that it was more of a forward estimate than a budget.

The three-year plan - it was not really a budget - relied very heavily on bottom lines which were to be achieved with magical formulations like administrative efficiencies. When these administrative efficiencies are not achieved, the budget falls over. This is what has happened in Health. Mrs Carnell and her Government set themselves up. The three-year budget plan was fundamentally flawed because it was not drafted to take into consideration, and did not recognise, that we do not live in a perfect world. The plan purported to lock in financial outcomes but it was not realistic.

Let me look for a brief moment, leaving Health aside for the present, at some of the persistent signs of a three-year budget plan in trouble. The three-year budget plan was based on unachievable assumptions about what was going to happen as far as wage outcomes were concerned. Mrs Carnell thought big, talked big, but could not deliver. She was not able to negotiate, to respond to pressure which affected her bottom line. The budget and its fiscal rectitude were put before flexibility, consultation and commonsense. Only in question time today, Mrs Carnell tried to say the word "compromise". Gee, it took a lot of trouble to get it from her lips. She had two or three tries to get the word out - c-c-c-compromise. It is a hard job, Mr Speaker, for Mrs Carnell to say it.

What about changes to revenue collected, Mrs Carnell? Mrs Carnell told the Estimates Committee that, on revenue, "We will be right". That is what you told the Estimates Committee. Not that we have seen any monthly statements to analyse when debating this Appropriation Bill; but, by all accounts, falls in the level of revenue collected are now highly likely. Mrs Carnell, when saying that there was not a budget blow-out in city services, said, "There is no budget blow-out, but maybe the receipts are down a little". This is Mrs Carnell's doublespeak: "There is no blow-out; we just do not have enough money". Mrs Carnell will not tell us how these revenue problems are going to affect the bottom line; she just will not tell us.

Let us turn to the problems with the health budget that have precipitated this unusual process of a second appropriation, an appropriation that by Mrs Carnell's own reckoning is unnecessary. The problems within the health budget were predictable, given the inherent problems with the three-year budget strategy. There are also many problems with the original appropriation for this program. Miscalculations and structural weakness were rife in the development of the Department of Health and Community Care budget. Your projected savings were optimistic, and you should have been far more prudent in your predictions of gains to be achieved in the current year. Of course, the worst kept secret in the ACT Government at the moment is the story about how the health budget was formulated. The story is all over town of Mrs Carnell phoning up in a blind panic at the last minute, saying, "Quick, quick, I need another $8m off the health budget",

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