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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4370 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

Members in this place who have a memory longer than five minutes will remember this Chief Minister, this Treasurer, as the one who lectured long and hard in this place, both before the last election and afterwards, about how she was not going to get into the business of shuffling bits of money around from this appropriation to that appropriation. She said that if a manager ran out of money they were going to be accountable to this place. They were going to come back into this place and say, "Please, sirs, please, ma'ams, please, members of parliament, can we have some more?". That was the position Mrs Carnell took three years ago, that was the position she took four years ago, and that was the position she took two years ago when she introduced this legislation.

Now we have a Bill which is full of little amendments here and little amendments there, all because her bureaucrats from OFM have come to her and said, "Would it not be much more convenient if we could squeeze a bit of money here and a bit of money there? We would not have to embarrass you by going back to the Assembly as we had to do with the health budget when you blew the health budget out". That is what it is all about. It is about whether members in this place genuinely believe in accountability of government. Two years ago it was accountability of government. Now Mrs Carnell's rhetoric is, "Let the managers manage. Let us not ask them too many questions".

If we believe in accountability, if we believe in ensuring that money is expended for the purposes that it was appropriated for, if we care about ensuring that we know what is going on, then we should not keep authorising the Government with new provisions to allow them to shuffle a little bit of money from here to there, because they all add up to officials in OFM being able to shuffle an awful lot of money around without accountability to this place. That is why the Labor Party oppose this amendment.

We believe that there is enough flexibility already in the Financial Management Act for, say, the chief executive of Urban Services to go to OFM and say, "We have this bill which is due on 2 July. Would it not be good if we could pay it now, because we can get a discount?". OFM have the flexibility to find the money somewhere else in the system to cover that. That is the way it should work within the constraints of the Financial Management Act. We should not keep on adding extra little bits here and extra little bits there. If we do, we will find that money we have voted to appropriate for one purpose is being spent for another purpose because we have given the Government and the Office of Financial Management too much latitude in this matter. That is why we oppose this amendment.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (9.55): Mr Speaker, I think Mr Whitecross might have misunderstood. There is no way that this money can be used for another purpose. This is money that can be used only for the purpose that it was appropriated for. The Assembly has already approved the expenditure. Mr Whitecross suggested that the way to do it, when you want to get this discount, is to go and find a bit of money from somewhere else. His view was that maybe we will go away and get something out of money we have appropriated for something else and use it for that purpose. I do not think that is terribly transparent. What we are suggesting is a very transparent approach.

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