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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3788 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

for the consultation process. But, if that work is going ahead, it really is important for the planners to sit back and have a look at where is the best place for expenditure of our money. At the moment, as I understand it, it is a traffic engineer who is making the recommendations dealing with the extension to Mouat Street and Ginninderra Drive, instead of somebody who has stood right back from the planning perspective and said, "What is the best overall picture that we can create here?".

I am very worried that a short-term solution - which is cheaper, granted - will be offered. The cost of the Mouat Street extension is, as I remember, something like $3.4m; Ginninderra Drive, some $9m; and then we have John Dedman Parkway crossing those two, all running together. It is appropriate for the Government to just put a hold on that and look very carefully at it from a planning perspective, instead of letting a traffic engineer rewrite the planning rules. Having listened to a number of people involved in that, particularly members of Mr De Domenico's department, I think it is time that that was looked at from an overall perspective instead of in that narrow way.

Mr Speaker, I would like to thank the other members of the select committee for their general tolerance and understanding. I think that the chair of the committee has done a particularly fine job in very difficult circumstances.

MR BERRY (8.40): Mr Speaker, this was an interesting experience from the outset. Aside from the fact that the budget was flawed in a range of areas and that this had been shown conclusively in the Estimates Committee hearings, we had the scenario that the Government's performance, both in preparing the budget and before the committee, left a lot to be desired. Clearly, Mr Speaker, it is just not up to scratch. We heard a bit said about the new budgeting process, the accrual system. We heard its praises sung - how it was the greatest thing since sliced bread, how it was time that the public sector caught up with the private sector and how we were ahead of New Zealand. What a joke! We are ahead of New Zealand! We would want to be. We have had self-government only since 1989; we do not have an army; we do not have a navy; we do not have a diplomatic corps; we do not have three million people. Why would we not be ahead of New Zealand when it comes to implementing this sort of stuff? To make those sorts of comparisons with New Zealand is just a little bit rich.

One of the biggest gaps in the accrual system is that side of the budget papers which demonstrates where our investment goes. It was raised in the Estimates Committee report. I think it was recommendation 5 that talked about the social and environmental indicators. The fact of the matter is that that is the major flaw with accrual accounting thus far. It has not been completed yet, because you cannot show the worth of your investment in the population, for example, in terms of education and wellness. You cannot show an estimate of your investment in the environment, in terms of its condition, what it will be like in future years, what future generations will have to pay for, and so on. That is a major gap, and it is something that makes the rest of it pale into insignificance, because you just do not have the value of your investment accounted for. If you have a look at a private sector investment, a business balance sheet, you can clearly see where the business stands, because you see all of its investment, right to the bottom line. But you cannot see that in the public sector, and you cannot see it with the partial application of accrual accounting in the public sector that we have in the ACT. So we have a long way to go yet.

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