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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 2 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 409 ..

MR KAINE

they were expected to be eight or 10 months ago. I also noticed an "other expenses" figure of $15m which drove total expenses to $42m below the result reported for the same period last year.

Even now we have depreciation and amortisation identified at $3.3m and we have interest expenses recorded at $1m, and yet we have an other expenses item of $15m. What is in there? The Chief Minister expects us to comment intelligently on her budget. Even after reading this document on the situation as purported to be at the end of January, I am not really clear on what it means, and I do not think that I am entirely lacking in knowledge and understanding of accounting. Yet we are expected to come in here and give positive and definitive answers to a series of questions. I will do my best with them. I think that the Chief Minister has, in fact, answered a lot of the questions in her own speech.

As to the respective roles of the Executive and the Assembly, I think the Leader of the Opposition put it quite succinctly: It is the responsibility of the Executive to put their budget on the table and it is the responsibility of the legislature to subject that budget to critical analysis. I do not see anything that would warrant changing that process. The fact that the Chief Minister wants to get off the hook on these matters is not sufficient justification.

As to the social and economic criteria, the Chief Minister circulated some information to people seeking their input and outlined the demographic changes, the economic factors and all of those things. I imagine that the Chief Minister is far better informed than I, having the whole of the treasury behind her to identify those figures. I take them as read, because I have no basis to question them.

Then we come to the real issues. The Chief Minister wants to know the level of revenue which the Territory should raise and how that level should be achieved. In conjunction with that, she wants to know the level of expenditure which the budget should incur and any specific priorities for expenditure. We should have them the other way round because the level of expenditure, of course, is what drives the need for revenue. So, if you look at what you believe the Government ought to be delivering in terms of service and you put a cost on that, that fixes your level of expenditure. The only way that you would change that would be to do away with some of the services that you are delivering. The Chief Minister outlined a lot of problems, but she did not indicate one area of service delivery where she would reduce the standard of delivery. She did refer to the possibility of closing some schools, I think. That is where you have to begin; you have to determine what your level of expenditure is going to be. You can then do something about collecting the revenue. Of course, that has constraints on it.

What is the point of asking me what the level of revenue should be? The Chief Minister knows the capacity of the Government to raise taxes, fees and charges. That is pretty well fixed, as I said before. We are up against the ceiling in terms of what other States and Territories do. We cannot go beyond that for the very reasons that the Chief Minister outlined. If you push the taxes, rates and charges up too high, your business simply decamps across the border to Queanbeyan. She knows that and we know that. What is the point, then, of asking us what the level of revenue should be or

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