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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3796 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

fully audited accounts are through. So, we will have two different sets of accounts that will be looked at. A lot of that will be alleviated by the fact that there are regular monthly payments to departments now and that the whole process of financial management has changed. But I do not want it to be considered that the subject has been decided one way or another yet. I think that it warrants a great deal more debate by the Assembly before any final commitments are made one way or the other.

As all members of the committee and other members of the Assembly have mentioned, there is a lot more in the text than came out in recommendations. We were not terribly keen on having 150 useless recommendations. So, we narrowed it down to the three broad areas that I mentioned in my introductory speech. Those still contain quite a level of work for the Government to do, which we will be keen to see in this initial response and then, of course, we will be matching it to the appropriation papers when we come to debate them later this week.

The issues are serious. It is important that the Assembly feels that the Government takes these things seriously. I was concerned by the interjections about the asset register. That recommendation was taken with great care. There is some very serious intent behind recommendation 10, as Mr Moore outlined. It comes very much at the notion - and it is not a judgment - that, if we have governments that believe that asset sale and lease-back management processes are better than borrowing, then we had better - - -

Mrs Carnell: Like New South Wales?

MS McRAE: Mrs Carnell, I did have the grace to say that we did not judge it. Perhaps I should express the stronger Labor opinion on that; but I will desist. At the moment, the judgment will be made by others, rather than by me or the Estimates Committee. We did not come down one way or another, although I imagine that the majority opinion may well not be in Mrs Carnell's favour.

In the accrual accounts that the Commonwealth is looking at and is about to put into place, all sale-lease management processes are called borrowing. So, there is every ground for believing that this is another form of borrowing. The Estimates Committee has left this open to a certain extent, because the judge and jury still have to sit and judge; but the intent of the recommendation, which seemed to upset a few people earlier, was to say, "All right; if this is a process that we are going to follow, if this is a process that Government is trying to convince us is a good one, then what potentially is up for sale and what is not? What are the restrictions that are going to be placed on it? What is the road map for the future that goes this way? What assets are sacrosanct and what assets are not?".

Everybody got into a great tither when I ran off my quite well sourced idea that schools could be sold. Yet, if you look at the potential of this, there is every chance that that is a perfectly reasonable path to go down if you are looking at asset lease-back processes. Schools that are very tired may well be an asset that is very nice to sell off, lease back and then be rid of. Whilst we have this process in train, I think it is absolutely essential that the Assembly does not underestimate the importance of that recommendation, because it means that it opens up that process to proper scrutiny, proper analysis and proper policy development that then gives people the options that the Government is potentially looking

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