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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3772 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

between what we had last year and what we had this year. Maybe they never grasped what we had last year and the year before either, but they certainly did not grasp what we had this year. I simply raise the question that there needs to be some considerable definition of what the role of the Estimates Committee is in future years and how it is to go about its task in order to be useful. I am not sure that this year's Estimates Committee was all that useful.

To exemplify my comments in that respect, I refer to recommendation 10, to which Ms McRae referred. It is that the committee recommends that the Government provide a separate budget paper containing a statement of the financial position of the ACT's marketable fixed assets and liabilities. First of all, fixed liabilities are not marketable. I do not think anybody would buy a fixed liability. But it raises the question of what is a marketable asset.

Ms McRae: Mr Kaine, you were on the committee. You could have helped us. It is a bit late to draw this nonsense now.

MR KAINE: I am entitled to raise questions about the budget, just as you are, and I intend to do so.

Ms McRae: You are not. You should have done it in the committee.

MR KAINE: The balance sheet, which is part of the accounts as now presented, is, in fact, a statement of the assets and liabilities of the Territory. If they are all marketable - and I could argue that every asset that the Territory owns is potentially marketable - then the balance sheet satisfies that criterion that has been set forward there by the Estimates Committee. I think that what the Estimates Committee meant was that some assets are more marketable than others. There are some which the Government might want to sell because they are a bit more attractive to the market, and those are the ones that they want identified specifically.

So, while I did not argue with the recommendation that was put forward by the committee, I have some questions in my mind about how the Government interprets it and what it can do that it did not do this year. I use that as a simple example of the fact that, in my view, members of the Estimates Committee do not understand what an accrual budget does, and they were not clear on what information they had before them and how they could use it. The search for additional information was much different from what would happen, for example, at a shareholders meeting of a public corporation, where the shareholders sit to examine the year's accounts - the profit and loss account, the income and expenditure account and the balance sheet. Those shareholders would not have asked for the same sort of detailed information as the members of the Estimates Committee asked for. They would, rather, have done an analysis of those accounts to determine whether the Government was doing well or doing badly. That analysis did not take place. I come back to my point. I think that maybe the Estimates Committee ought to be reconvened and take some professional advice from somewhere as to what its role is under the new system and how it should perform its function.

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