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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1626 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

For the estimates process to be successful, it requires that all participants come to this process to share information and that we have true transparency and full information. The papers which provide for us the information on which we base most of the discussion and scrutiny, at times, do not give us the clarity of information that we need. I acknowledge that these papers are written to the standards of best practice in accrual accounting. We should also acknowledge the awards won by the various members of OFM in the last year for the introduction of accrual accounting in the ACT. But I still think that we can work towards more clarity of information within these papers. Without taking away from the fact that there is quite an amount of specialised information and use of definition, we can still place it better. This has been raised in the recommendations of the Estimates Committee.

This is only the second time that this method has been used in the ACT, but we still have many of the same difficulties in getting comparative information. We still had some difficulties in understanding what changes had been made to various statements and output classes, as mentioned in recommendation 1. Next year, no matter which government is in power in the ACT, we need to ensure that we have this clarity so that there is full understanding when various functions are moved between agencies, so that there is no loss of information and so that there is no loss of the targets contained within the output classes.

Also, there are some problems in the different budget papers, with some differences in the amounts shown for various things. For example, some of the changes that were made to the budget can be seen in the Housing financial statements, where the revenue under "User Charges" was put in with its full amount that would be obtained this year if full market rents were introduced and paid by all Housing tenants; but there was no note to explain how what was shown as revenue of $46m last year suddenly became $92m in this year's budget figures. This is quite confusing. For this type of information, there should be careful scrutiny and examination before the budget papers are published.

I would just like to raise one further matter within the housing budget. For 1996-97, for the Kick Start deposit gap system, no targets are shown. When questions were raised on this, it was suggested that this program had been introduced so late into the budget discussions last year that it was not possible to put up a target. Since the Treasurer announced in her budget speech in September last year that 500 of these deposit gap grants would be issued in this financial year, surely this is the target for 1996-97 for this scheme. I think there needs to be some clarification of whether the announcement by the Treasurer of what will be achieved this year is the target for the department. Does the person in charge - the chief executive officer of that department - have an obligation to meet this target in 1996-97 if the Treasurer has announced that that is what will be issued this year? The Minister said that, in fact, they were not going to reach this target of 500, or that it was very unlikely. Consequently, there are unspent funds in this sector of the budget for this year. But there is no indication of any rollover or whether

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