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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4233 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

What we found very unsatisfactory was that Territory-owned corporations are not required to report within the same timeframe as everybody else. That ended up holding up the estimates inquiry process. We have recommended that Territory-owned corporations fit within the same timeframe as all other departments and agencies. We are convinced that that is entirely practicable. We also believe that their annual reports should fulfil the same requirements as all other annual reports in terms of information on EEO, FOI requests and all the other management processes that have to be reported on.

We found, as we have long been saying, that borrowings are borrowings are borrowings, and no amount of rephrasing of that or putting it under any other accounting framework can hide the fact that the Government has borrowed. We have made that quite clear in this report, and I believe it is coming through much more clearly in other reports, as well as in the comments offered by the Auditor-General. We believe that it is very important for the people of Canberra to know that, no matter what scheme is used, the Territory has actually incurred liabilities in the form of borrowings. These must be known about and must be dealt with in an open and consistent manner.

We were very disappointed with the way departments reacted to questions on notice and requests for further information. Although there was a very high level of goodwill, the process for the management of answers to questions on notice was very slow. In some cases the answers were inadequate and members had to go back and ask for further detail. We must put the departments on notice that the Estimates Committee is one of the most important committees for the people of the ACT. The people of the ACT must know that when information is sought and when details are requested all members are treated with respect and that that information is provided. It is as important for the people of the ACT as it is for the Assembly and for the good working of government. We were very disappointed with the management of that process and we very strongly recommend that what happened never happen again.

The Public Accounts Committee determines the budget for the Auditor-General. It became clear that in some areas of technical inquiry that the Auditor-General seeks to undertake his resources are probably not sufficient. This was so in relation to the report on the management of betterment and the payment of betterment, to which the Government is still to respond. It seems to the Estimates Committee that, if the Auditor-General has a broad brief to review and examine every activity of government, the Assembly and the people of Canberra must be assured that the resources are sufficient for the Auditor-General to do that. Recommendation 6 deals with that matter.

Recommendation 7 begins a series of comments which are really an indictment of the Government's reporting on its social policy initiatives. We found out that nobody really knew how many people were homeless and nobody really knew how the data was collected. The process of data collection was entirely inadequate. We found that completely unsatisfactory. How on earth could we measure what the Government was doing and whether its policies were effective if, in fact, its data collection mechanisms were insufficient and of very poor quality?

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