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

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1618 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

The first recommendation relates to output classes, where they change from one year to the next. We have to anticipate them for next year because, with a change of government - we certainly hope that there will be a change of government - or certainly after an election, there may well be changes to the administrative orders and therefore changes again to the definition of output classes. The recommendation is particularly pertinent for next year. With those changes we recommend that some explanation be given to make it easier for both the Estimates Committee and the general public to find their way through these quite informative and good budget papers that we are now seeing.

The second recommendation relates to Commonwealth funding. It is a major disappointment that, in almost every budget we have ever had, we are never absolutely clear about how much money the Commonwealth is actually providing. So, we are recommending that the Government make available to the Assembly as soon as possible details of the actual specific purpose grants and then make clear what is the impact of those on each of the budget areas. This would require a supplementary paper to be presented to the Assembly. So, whether the budget was late or early, or somewhere in between, the Assembly could always confidently expect some explanation of what was going on.

Recommendation 3 harks back to a recommendation in relation to the previous year's estimates where we wanted very much to see how whole-of-government policy initiatives had or had not been implemented and what was the progress towards their implementation. We are suggesting that all performance targets, whether budget performance indicators or policy implementation indicators, be included in the Budget Overview and other relevant budget papers, so that we can see quite clearly what progress is being made towards the larger whole-of-government objectives, often policy objectives, as opposed to the smaller nuts and bolts finance-related activity.

The superannuation scheme obviously drew a lot of attention. The Government was well prepared for the type of questioning that was presented to it, and so it should have been, because this is an area of major concern. It is something that has dogged every government since self-government. It is something that we are all quite aware of; but it is gradually slipping away from us and, unless the revenue base increases dramatically, we will have an extraordinary level of debt building up. Again, this Assembly needs to know exactly what is happening in terms of those growing liabilities and potential debt and it needs to be better informed on how the Government itself is actually handling the matter, for which there seemed to be very little evidence before the Assembly. Other than the Government knowing exactly what the problem was, it seemed that there was not yet a coherent plan for how to deal with it.

The whole area of the environment caused much anxiety to many committee members, because documents like The 1997-98 Budget at a Glance provided an overview of a whole lot of areas, but not the environment area. On close questioning, the committee was told, "The environment is dealt with in a whole range of different areas, and it is not just the Minister for the Environment who does environmentally sound things".

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