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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 1509 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

My only reservation about this Estimates Committee was that I do not think we had enough time to properly examine all the areas that we would have wished to examine. Bear in mind, as I said earlier, that hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of public servants have worked in one way or another to put together the budget process. A whole heap of public relations experts and senior officers have also worked to make sure that nobody can find anything to criticise the Government about, so that means things are buried.

Mr Hargreaves: The spin doctors.

MR BERRY: My colleague interjects and mentions the spin doctors. That is true because a lot of work goes into making sure that there is nothing to criticise the Government about. That means, in essence, that basic information quite often is hard to find. It is not always easy to find it immediately.

Mrs Carnell was heavily critical of us for suggesting a budget measures statement as appears in the Federal budget. I have in front of me the budget measures statement for 1998-99 and I will give you some examples of the sorts of measures that they produce in this report. It has nothing to do with endorsing the approach which is taken by the Commonwealth in relation to their budget. This is about providing adequate information for estimates committees or scrutiny committees, like our own, to be able to determine how the budget is going. Here we go. I refer to item 86 on page 112:

Extend eligibility for Youth Allowance - Definition of independence.

There is $7.7m in 1998-99, and it goes right through the outyears to 2001-02.

If the Government had this sort of measures statement it would have said in relation to the Institute of the Arts exactly what was happening with the grants process, and we would be able to search through a much smaller document than this and discover exactly what had been happening with government expenditure. What has been suggested to the Government is that they come up with a measures statement that makes it easier for people to get immediate access to budget information. I do not care what the Chief Minister calls it; she can call it what she likes. She can call it the "Kate Carnell Miracle Booklet" as far as I am concerned. It does not matter, as long as when we open it we are able to get to the information more easily. That is all the committee was interested in. So, the underlying principles in relation to this are the most important issues.

Once again, I would like to thank all of those colleagues who participated in the Estimates Committee process, not just the members of the committee but those other members who put time aside to come down and actively participate in it. I have already thanked the secretariat for their participation. They need to be mentioned again because theirs was a sterling effort. They had a short timeframe to put something sensible together as a recommendation to the Government, and we trust that the Government will take it seriously. We got all the push and shove today about people howling in an

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