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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1560 ..

Ms McRae: Because the rest has gone; that is why.

MRS CARNELL: No, not at all. It is quite simple, Mr Speaker. If all of the money is available in one program, it is obviously substantially more efficient to transfer it in that way. We made it very clear in the Estimates Committee as well that it could come from any of the three sources or a combination of the three. We have determined to take one of those sources where we know that the money will be available again, unfortunately.

Mr Whitecross made a comment about some rumour or something about $8m and a phone call of some description. Mr Speaker, I can guarantee to this house that there was no phone call about $8m, saying, "Heavens! Help! We need another $8m". In fact, for the information of this Assembly, I would like to actually table the final budget paper for the health budget, which is where Greg Fraser, Mike Woods and I actually signed off on the health budget, indicating that it was achievable, appropriate and, in fact, good enough for both of those people at the time to sign off on. I think, though, it is very important to indicate that any budget must be agreed on by all of the parties - that is, at the time the Under Treasurer, the head of the department and the Minister involved. So, any indication whatsoever that I, as Minister, directed any of those people to find $8m that they were not willing to sign off on is obviously wrong.

Mr Speaker, I think, from the perspective of the Bill that we are talking about today, Mr Moore hit the nail on the head. There is no doubt that this has received more scrutiny than has ever been given to any other health overrun, or, for that matter, any change in appropriation or change in method of spending money. That, in essence, means that it is more available to the community and to the Assembly, to ensure that they understand what has happened, why it has happened and under what circumstances it has happened. Mr Speaker, from that perspective, I believe that a second Appropriation Bill is the right way to go. I do not believe that signing off significant changes in amounts of money - particularly moving significant amounts of money from capital to recurrent budgets after the end of the financial year and signing them off - and potentially tabling them in the Assembly at some stage will achieve nearly the same level of scrutiny. I believe that scrutiny is extremely important in these sorts of areas.

Mr Speaker, in the past, section 49 or subsection 47(2) has been used to transfer very small amounts of money. I think it is important to look at the document that was signed by me and Mr Walker on 14 July 1995 so that some of these transfers could occur. The transfers were half a million dollars here, $400,000 somewhere else and $1.1m to the Attorney-General's Department, for a major court trial. They were for those sorts of issues. They were smallish amounts of money which were for one-off expenditure or for approved expenditure under very specific circumstances. Nowhere in any of these is there $14.2m for a health overrun. It is simply ridiculous to use that sort of method for large amounts of money. In the past it has not produced the amount of information that this procedure has. Mr Speaker, much as it has been a very painful approach for the Government - we always knew that it would be - we believed strongly that this Assembly and the people of Canberra had a right to know exactly what was happening to their money.

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