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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 5 Hansard (5 May) . . Page.. 1354 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I think more harm has been done to the Auditor-General by the Government's arguments. It is pretty insulting to be saying that because the accounts were ticked off by the Auditor-General, they went to the public accounts committee and the committee said nothing therefore everything is fine, when it is publicly known, and there has been great debate about it for the last two weeks, that there are concerns about the legality. The Auditor-General is interested in those concerns about the legality. The fact that it was not specifically mentioned in the financial audit report is not the point. That is not why people in the ACT community are very concerned. What people in the ACT community are concerned about is that they have seen an expenditure of a significant amount of money that was not appropriated and that was borrowed at the end of the financial year and paid back the next day in order to make the accounts look right.

Whether or not Labor did that in the past is not the point either. This is about how governments manage money. I heard Mr Humphries say that whatever happened was within the intent of the Financial Management Act. When I look at the presentation speech for the Financial Management Bill, I notice that at the end Mrs Carnell said:

The point is that appropriation limits were obviously not respected in this matter. They were respected at the end of the financial year, absolutely, and that is why it is all so interesting. But the obvious question that has to be asked - and you do not have to be an expert to ask this question - is: What does that mean? Does that mean that that could occur across all of government? Can you just spend more than was appropriated and then borrow it and pay it back quickly to make the accounts look okay? That is why legal advice is being sought, that is why the community has an interest in this and that is why the arguments put by the Liberals today look pretty silly. They seem to be trying to suggest that Labor did this once, and how dare they speak about it? They are speaking as if it is not an issue of concern. It is of grave concern to the community.

In 1996, when we debated the Financial Management Bill, the Greens did ask that there be a sunset clause and a review in three years, which would have been due in June of this year, because we could see that, as a new piece of legislation, it may well need reviewing and that there may well be problems. I will be putting to the Assembly tomorrow that the public accounts committee, the Chief Minister's Portfolio Committee, should carry out such a review. That would be useful, because there are a number of matters, other than those that have come out of this Bruce Stadium issue, that I believe need to be looked at again.

The cost to taxpayers was mentioned by Mrs Carnell. I think most of us believe that if this is about accountability and openness then the costs are worth being paid. There obviously will be costs anyway to get these documents together for the Auditor-General. That cost would have been incurred anyway. There probably will be extra costs if the documents come to the Assembly, because there are other issues of disclosure of information, particularly those related to commercial-in-confidence.

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