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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 11 Hansard (26 September) . . Page.. 3479 ..

MS TUCKER (3.50): Mr Speaker, this budget, like all other budgets, will be judged in the future and it will be condemned because it does very little to improve environmental or social sustainability, let alone cement a viable long-term economic direction for the ACT. This budget is also the first under the new financial management regime which was passed by the Assembly earlier this year.

Obviously, it is early days and we cannot expect any government to get it absolutely right the first time; but it is important that we are moving in the right direction, and this accounting model is full of dangers. What is more, for all the fanfare about increased transparency - we have already heard Mr Moore speak at length on this issue, and Mr Whitecross - we say that this is really an iceberg budget that hides more under the surface than it reveals. Until we scratch beneath the surface I think a lot of the real substance of this budget remains hidden. I will speak further on that a bit later. If we are really on about making our models accurately reflect all costs to the community, we hould be thinking about not only future superannuation payments but also future financial, social and environmental costs that will flow from decisions that are made today. Homelessness, social alienation, cleaning up the Murray-Darling Basin, violence, endless mounts of money spent on policing and our legal system are all examples of social and environmental problems that are costing us dearly now because of our failure to take adequate preventative action in the past.

Mr Speaker, the Greens accept that this ACT budget has been framed in difficult economic times, but we would like to make the point that governments all over Australia are telling us that times are tough and we have to tighten the belt, cut services in health, housing, legal aid and so on, as well as sell off the farm. The fact is that as a nation we have never been richer in terms of GDP, so what we are really seeing is a growing gap between the rich and the poor, and government functions increasingly being transferred to the private sector. It is time this trend was reversed. That is why the Greens would like to expand the concept of deficit to include environmental and social deficits. Unless our performance measures and accounting models reflect all relevant factors, including quantitative and qualitative information, we will never know the social and environmental bottom lines of government performance.

Over the past 18 months the Greens have often spoken about the need to get the ACT's financial models right. Just this year we introduced a series of amendments to the Auditor-General Bill and the Financial Management Bill in an attempt to introduce environmental accounts, and we also spoke at length about some of the costs of the purchaser-provider model and output-based funding which are central features of not only this budget but also the purchase agreements. If anything that is not specifically mentioned as an output is going to fall off the agenda, then it is critical that we get it right. It appears that there is little acknowledgment of some critical qualitative factors in the output statements. Having stated that the budget must be evaluated against a broad range of criteria, obviously going through the detail will be very important. The stimates Committee process is a very important process, but it is going to be all the more important this year, and we are going to have to search very hard to see what the real changes are. Going through each of the output classes and looking at performance indicators will also be very important, particularly as the output statements are now used as a basis for performance contracts.

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