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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3783 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

social and environmental indicators, one serious deficiency the committee highlighted was the fact that many of the quality indicators were only to refer to performance measures for policy advice. Last year, we were told that the new outlook-based budget model would be the answer to all of the problems we have ever faced on the indicator front. It is an ongoing process, but I look forward to a much more positive response from the Government to the recommendation on indicators this year than we had last year. Mr Speaker, I did not receive any clear answers to how the purchase agreements would be evaluated. Another good political line that has been used to sell this budget is that it was a bottom-up, or zero-based, budget. That may be a good political line, like the three-year budget was last year; but the truth is that agencies did not chuck out last year's figures when coming up with this year's expenditure targets.

The final issue I want to raise in relation to the budget reforms is the issue of community service obligations. It was rather curious that the only area that had explicitly identified CSOs was ACTION, given that CSOs are a major aspect of the purchaser-provider model. The committee was also concerned about the absence of any environmental CSOs for ACTION, which is rather curious for a public transport system, especially since the Government did indicate in last year's Estimates Committee that there would be these indicators. Maybe if we did acknowledge the contribution that public transport makes - contributing to protection of the environment by reducing greenhouse gases - the bus service would not keep getting cut. The costs would show that it was worth while maintaining it, and these costs would be seen as an investment and not a subsidy. I would like to remind the Government that the Select Committee on Estimates made a number of recommendations about CSOs last year.

The asset sales were another issue - the smoke and mirrors cash surplus - the first in the whole budget strategy of relying on asset sales to plug the deficit without, it appears, any detailed cost-benefit analysis. The outcome of the Public Accounts Committee inquiry into sale and lease-back transactions is also going to be very interesting. Obviously, one of the greatest motivations for the ACT Government, aside from window-dressing the ACT's financial situation, is tax. But, if we are just shifting the costs from the ACT to the Commonwealth, ACT citizens are not benefiting from such transactions in the longer term. The merits of the whole strategy from a longer-term economic point of view need to be seriously questioned. The Public Accounts Committee will possibly be too late for the buses and the Magistrates Court, but there is at least the potential to come up with some principles on this very important issue.

The second main big-picture item that the committee looked at was Jobs for Canberra. It was clear from the start that Jobs for Canberra was a bit of a whitewash. Questioning in the Estimates Committee confirmed this point and also balanced this against the jobs that have been lost in the public service over the past 12 months. It is going to be interesting to see whether the committee can evaluate whether or not the target of 2,700 jobs that it is claimed will be created by this Government can be assessed.

Kick Start was one of the most controversial items in Jobs for Canberra. I guess that the kindest thing to say about Kick Start is that it is about the best you could expect to come up with for something that was cooked up in about three days, with no consultation, no open tender process and no substantive analysis. We even had the concept of

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