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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3773 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I just want to comment on recommendation 5, which comes back to this question of performance measures. Those of us who have sat on estimates committees for the last nine years have, every year, tried to get performance measures that could show how well the government was doing. We now have outcome-based accounting, where the performance indicators had better be fairly precise, because only by measuring them can you determine whether the Government is meeting its objectives or not. So, to some degree, I was disappointed that the performance measures as expressed in the budget in many cases were still not capable of objective measurement; but I give the Government the benefit of the doubt, in that this is the first year that we have had such accounting and I presume that next year the statement of outputs and outcomes will be much more specific and will form a basis for the Estimates Committee to look at those and see whether the Government is performing in terms of its own predictions or whether it is not.

This particular recommendation also raises the question of social and environmental indicators. This introduces a complexity, because the books of account normally do not include social and environmental factors. They are books that show expenditure of money, collection of revenues and the like. We are asking the Government to go beyond that and to include two new dimensions to the accounts. So, the accounts in future will not only be financial; they will include social and environmental indicators as well. The environmental accounting concept, of course, is still embryonic, although it has been given a lot of attention around the world in recent times. No doubt, just as concepts of program budgeting, performance indicators and the like have been evolved over a period of about 20 years, we will eventually see a clear definition of what we mean by environmental accounting and it will be properly incorporated into the accounts. I have mentioned this in other places. I do not expect to see it in this decade, quite frankly, because it is too ill-defined at the moment as to what is meant by it and how you incorporate it into a set of financial accounts.

I have only one other matter that I want to comment on, Mr Speaker. That is a matter on which the committee has made no recommendation. It has to do with paragraph 2.10, which talks about the future of the Estimates Committee. It states that the committee proposes that, once next year's Estimates Committee has reported on the budget proper, the committee be re-formed to examine the detail of all agency operations and performances over a more extended period. I have raised this matter before. We are in the situation already where the Estimates Committee overlaps the responsibility of the Public Accounts Committee. It is the responsibility of the Public Accounts Committee to look at the accounts of the Government and determine whether they are in order. It is the responsibility of the Estimates Committee to look at the estimates - not at what happened last year or the year before. That is performance information that is the prerogative of the Public Accounts Committee. We are duplicating in the two committees the responsibility for this function. I have argued before that - - -

Ms McRae: You lost. Helen Szuty did it.

MR KAINE: I listened to you in silence, madam. I have argued before, on many an occasion, that we do not seem to be too clear on what the role of the Estimates Committee is. When you get to the point of suggesting that the Estimates Committee be reconvened six months after the estimates have been dealt with,

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