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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1718 ..

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (4.51): Mr Speaker, the Opposition will be supporting this package of Bills. This package of Bills entails a rewrite of the Audit Act which is long overdue. The Audit Act needed to be rewritten. It is outdated; it is repetitive. Reform has been on the agenda of this Assembly for some time. Work has been going on for a number of years on this and related issues such as accrual accounting, which is another element in this legislation. The financial reporting arrangements have been behind reform in other States, and this legislation almost takes us to the forefront. It is indeed a giant step - in some respects perhaps too big a step, but I will talk about that in a minute. The Audit Act underpins all major aspects of the public finances of the Territory, so replacement of that Act is no minor change. The other two Bills which we are debating cognately today also represent significant reform.

Mr Speaker, having said that the Opposition will be supporting this process, I have to say that we do so not without some misgivings about the way that the reform process has been managed. Significant resources have been tied up in the Public Service in addressing the reform agenda which this Bill contains and surrounding matters. This has imposed a quite severe burden on the Public Service. Public servants have been trying to get to grips with a range of new issues in accounting, including accrual accounting, what it means and how to apply it; but what about its impact? The effect of all this on the quality of decision-making will take some time to assess. From what I can gather, little has been done on the policy implications of the reforms. With the amount of technical work required to come to grips with the implications of the shift to accrual accounting, relatively little time has been available to do an analysis of the implications. Certainly, work has been done on defining outputs and on performance criteria, but there is a huge weight of work. All the anecdotal evidence that has come to me is that it is a weight of work which many areas of the Public Service, already burdened with the financial constraints that have been imposed by the Government, are finding it very difficult to deal with. In short, Mr Speaker, I think the reform process has not been entirely well managed and there has been a certain amount of haste about it.

Let me give you some perspective about this agenda. Mrs Carnell likes to make out that this financial reform package will fix all financial problems.

Mrs Carnell: I wish that it would.

MR WHITECROSS: Perhaps Mrs Carnell is not so sure now. The health budget might still have blown out and revenue might still be down. Getting back to my point, it is a nonsense to suggest that we did not know where all our money was being spent before and that, with the passage of this Bill, we suddenly will know where all our money is being spent and what we are getting for it. It will not be as simple as that. That is the reality. The Government will still be able to transfer money between appropriations, as was possible in the past and - - -

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