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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 1450 ..

Mr Corbell: The budget is an instrument of policy. It is the instrument of policy.

MS CARNELL: Mr Speaker, I do not believe Mr Berry was interjected upon once, not once.

Mr Berry: He is not talking now either.

MS CARNELL: I do not think, Mr Speaker, anybody from this side interjected on Mr Berry.

MR SPEAKER: Settle down, everybody.

Mr Berry: I never said a word. Would you report that I never said a word?

Mr Hargreaves: There was nobody from that side over there. There was no-one here.

MS CARNELL: There you go. Mr Speaker, this Estimates Committee report is an absolute farce because, as Treasurer - the person, you would assume, who would be asked lots of questions about the budget - I think I was asked one question in a day-and-a-half of estimates. What used to happen - Mr Moore would agree with me - is that we would have the budget papers and would say, "Okay, turn over the page. What is the line? What are those expenses being spent on? Why have you purchased this number of services? What have they cost? Why has it cost this much?". You ask all those normal questions in estimates to assess whether the government of the day is proposing to spend taxpayers' money appropriately.

Mr Speaker, almost none of those questions were asked. So what was the process about? It was a prolonged question time. That is how I saw it. Mr Berry was the most experienced person on that Estimates Committee and the chair. Therefore, he had a responsibility to direct the committee down the path of doing what an estimates committee is supposed to do. Unfortunately, he did not do so. The recommendations are predominantly about policy direction. Very few of them have anything to do with the budget at all, Mr Speaker. They are policy directions, or recommendations, for government.

Mr Hird made some comments about accrual accounting versus cash-based accounting. I agree with Mr Hird that when I read recommendation No. 4, which suggested that they actually wanted future budgets to be presented like the Federal budget, which of course is a cash-based budget - - -

Mr Berry: No. We never said that.

MS CARNELL: The report did. It says here:

The committee recommends that future budgets include both outlays measures and revenue measures, similar to those provided in the Federal budget.

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