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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (1 September) . . Page.. 1685 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Perhaps more interesting is the growing sense of anger in this community, whether it is anger over the cuts to the Institute of the Arts and the tens of thousands of people that decision has affected, whether it is anger over the impact of the insurance levy, which when put into place will discriminate against many lower-income earners who choose, quite rightly, to insure their properties, or whether it is over the fact that those people who have a smaller vehicle find themselves, through some quirk of registration classifications, actually paying more. Wherever you go throughout our community there is an anger. It is a quiet but growing anger. We have seen it demonstrated most obviously in the protests outside this place over the Institute of the Arts, but there are many other issues such as the registration fees and the insurance levy. Buses are another issue. We will address all of those when we come to the appropriate appropriation units. The feedback we are receiving is that this budget is not caring. This budget is certainly not clever, because it chooses to measure things purely in figures. It does not make an assessment of the social value of the decisions that it implements. It does not make an assessment of the impact that the lack of judgment on those values in this budget will have.

Through the Estimates Committee process, we found that the budget was not transparent and it was not comparable with earlier budgets. Time and time again cuts were hidden in clever accounting treatments, and threats to programs or services were hidden in meaningless performance measures and absurdly broad output classes. I think I speak for most members in this place when I say that this budget, far from being transparent and understandable, is one of the most difficult documents that most members in this place would ever have had to assess.

I make a point which my colleague Mr Wood made earlier. Where was the indication of the reduction in funding to the Institute of the Arts? We did not see it. We could not even find it. The Chief Minister says it was there. If it was there it was not shown in a very transparent way. It was not shown in a very accountable way. It was hidden. What did it take to discover the impact of that cut? It took the people who were affected by it to come out and say what had happened. Thank goodness they did. Thank goodness they did not succumb to the blackmail and bullying which often come from the Chief Minister's office.

There are a range of other issues in this budget which raise concern. What is the rationale for the financial performance measurement analysis measures in the context of a government department? How meaningful are these measures? How appropriate are these measures? What do they tell us about transparency? What do they tell us about the performance of government organisations and government departments, including in this case the Chief Minister's Department? In other words, what is their use and how do they reflect good or bad financial performance by a department? These are questions that we were not able to get answers for.

Ms Carnell: You did not ask.

MR CORBELL: We did ask these questions about financial performance measurements.

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