Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (21 November) . . Page.. 4053 ..

Mrs Carnell: We agreed in principle.

MS McRAE: You agreed in principle. This is Mrs Carnell's idea of agreement. Agree in principle and then, hey presto, next year it is not there. I am saying here and now that the request of the Estimates Committee was a serious one. I take "Agreed in principle" to mean that within a week of next year's budget papers we will have cross-referencing. I accept that it may not all be as necessary as it was this year because the annual reports will not be there, but perhaps some of the agreements will be, and perhaps some of the cross-referencing will help.

It was the absence of any concern by the current Government about the difficulties that would be encountered by the Estimates Committee that drove the Estimates Committee to do this. It is up to the Government to make these things clear - where all the different parts are and how they link together. We have had one go at it and I think that next year, if it is not ready, if it cannot be done at budget time, it could be done when the annual reports are done and there could be some cross-referencing done there, or within a week of the budget papers, depending on how much information is given. This was a recommendation made with serious intent and we expected it to be picked up seriously.

Recommendation 7, which Mr Whitecross might have alluded to already, the one in relation to jobs, was also treated in a very cavalier manner. It is quite clear that the Estimates Committee did believe that a part-time job was a part-time job but was demanding that descriptions of potential jobs be made and portrayed accurately so that no impression was given to anybody, either in the Assembly or outside, that jobs being talked about were anything but full time and those equivalents. That was the intent. To find in a Government response to an Estimates Committee, "Does not the Estimates Committee believe that part-time jobs are jobs?", is downright childish and a disgrace to the Government.

Finally, there is the matter of the concerns raised by the Auditor-General that the Government responded to on page 16 in regard to paragraph 2.35 of the committee's report. This is another instance of the sorts of matters that I find of grave concern in relation to the Estimates Committee work. It was quite clear that the Auditor-General had serious problems beyond those of audited and unaudited accounts. They were acknowledged and there was an agreement that one set of documents be amended once those errors, once those differences of opinion, were sorted out.

Mrs Carnell: The ownership agreements.

MS McRAE: The ownership agreements. Thank you, Mrs Carnell. You see, I need a map; I really do. It was clear that there was a problem. To find in the Government's response that they cannot even cope with "errors in the budget papers" and that the problems are "rather variations in classification, differences in accounting treatment and the inclusion of unaudited comparative information which were clearly identified as such" is just churlish. I had indicated in the debate when I presented the Estimates Committee

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .