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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1555 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

So, here is the Chief Minister herself, in her opening statement, saying exactly what she said was wrong about the Audit Act, in that the detail of these transfers can be known about only after the end of the financial year anyway. So, why on earth are proper procedures for the transfer of money to a particular level under the Audit Act - an appropriately guarded Act - wrong, but for us to have to wait until the end of the financial year to discover where the money came from and how it was transferred is not wrong? I think there is an element of doublespeak here that is mystifying to all concerned.

If the Chief Minister really wanted to make this issue public, there is a range of ways by which she could have ensured that nobody would ever accuse her or her Government of doing anything in the dead of night. Question time has been amply shown to be a time when ministerial statements can be made. It could have been done in answer to a question, even a dorothy dixer. It could have been done by way of a ministerial statement. It could have been done simply by way of an announcement to the Assembly. It could have been done by way of a motion to the Assembly: That the Assembly accepts that the Chief Minister has had to transfer $14.2m to the health budget. All those factors were open to the Chief Minister.

But what were we told during the estimates committee process? We were told, "Oh, no. What the Chief Minister is doing, what the Government is doing, is something that is done in other parliaments". Of course, when we explored that a little more deeply we found that what was done in other parliaments was not quite the same as what we were doing; that it was done in only two other parliaments; and that the Federal Parliament's requirements were more or less the same in procedure, but couched in a framework of quite different financial controls from those that apply here. There is no way in the Federal Parliament that it can be put before the parliament in the way that it was before us: "There are three possible areas where this money could come from, but we cannot tell you now where the money is coming from". It is simply not in order. So, we had plenty of reasons to be dissatisfied with what was before us, and I am yet to be convinced that this is anything more than a very strange way to make public something that could have been made public quite easily, in a range of quite straightforward ways, to the Assembly.

After all these open processes where we were meant to find out what was going on, only now do we find out that the $14.2m is being taken completely and totally from public works. I would like the Chief Minister to now put on record and give the Assembly the full financial information that made her so comfortable about taking the $14.2m out of the public works budget when, on only 23 April, we were being told that they could not, at that point, make a decision about which area, because all the financial information was not before them. If the financial information is before them, I would like to know why it is so easy simply to take money from public works. I think the Assembly deserves to have all that information before it. If the Estimates Committee had been told categorically that the money was coming purely from the public works program, it would have gone on even more about the implications of that. As it is, people were very dissatisfied about the impact of taking out public works money for the health budget, particularly when it was made clear to us that money was available from other areas. Plenty of members have spoken about it since then.

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