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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3777 ..

(Extension of time granted)

MR WOOD: You can argue about relevance, Chief Minister. I know that it is embarrassing. That is the problem. What is not relevant is embarrassing to the Chief Minister. That is the way she presents it.

The outsourcing of business is a primary concern for this Government. The budget should have had a response to that problem. Our future depends very largely on it.

Mrs Carnell: There is $2m for business loans and $700,000 for business incentives.

MR WOOD: It will not go very far. It is not factored in. As I read your rhetoric in Jobs For Canberra, it is not factored in. There is no reference anywhere at all to the outsourcing of Commonwealth business. Yet the ACT's future depends very substantially on holding that business in Canberra.

The budget failed to attend to the major problem facing Canberra at the moment. With others - there is nothing hidden about this; everybody is pointing to this problem, especially the business community - I called for the Government to attend to that need. Yesterday, I did so again, and the Government came out with a statement, made at the last minute, pointing out what it intends to do. The Minister said today, in answer to a dorothy dixer, that the Government has been working, and these are his words, "slowly but surely" - it is not so surely, but it is certainly very slowly - to attend to the problem. So we do have some response, belatedly; but again it is too little and it is too late. It should have been in the budget.

It is particularly noteworthy that there is no money attached to this proposal now put forward by the Deputy Chief Minister, yet it is quite clear that a considerable amount of money will have to be expended to assist Canberra business if we are to help them make their submissions and if we are to help them develop consortia and new arrangements that will be necessary to attract this business. Yet, with the announcement, there is no indication of money. The announcement needed to be a great deal more than it was.

Mr Kaine made some comments about the accrual budget. I will say this: He professes to understand it. Perhaps he should. He is a trained accountant, as he often tells us. But it was my very clear impression during all the Estimates Committee hearings that there was no-one there who was on top of accrual accounting. No-one, from top to bottom, including the bureaucrats, fully understood what it was all about. We have all stood up in this Assembly before. We have all heard the rhetoric. Earlier governments have been going down the path of accrual budgeting. So it is our responsibility. I cannot walk away from that. But I hope that, as time goes by, the people who are formulating it, as well as those who are trying to understand it, do become more proficient at reading through it.

There is one note on comparisons that I want to make, because we heard from Ms McRae that it is difficult to make comparisons from this year to last year. There is another comparison that is difficult to make. I can compare these last couple of budgets of Mrs Carnell's with the budgets of the Follett Government in the time when

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