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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1876 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

There are a range of other things that I could go to, and I feel inclined to, just to debunk some the nonsense that has been presented to us here today by those on the other side. They go to the question of the so-called appropriation defence. The Chief Minister said earlier that it had been suggested that all money spent by the ACT Government must be included in an Appropriation Act. That was not said in my speech; it was not said by the Labor Party. In fact, the Labor Party agrees with the Chief Minister, who wrote in the explanatory memorandum to the Financial Management Act that section 6 went to the fundamental proposition that the expenditure of public money requires formal parliamentary authorisation. Section 6 is clearly expressed:

That is "appropriation" without a capital "a". It is "appropriation" without the word "Act" appended to it. Labor accepts that expenditure can be authorised without an Appropriation Act. We accept that; we know that. The clear fact in this matter is that the expenditure on Bruce Stadium over and above the $12.3m was not authorised and has never been authorised.

We have had the "it is only a technicality" defence. A breach of section 6 - and Mr Rugendyke at least has acknowledged this - cannot be brushed off lightly as a technicality. Giving evidence before the Estimates Committee on 4 June, the Auditor-General was asked by Mr Hird if he would accept the view that there was always likely to be technical problems with complex pieces of legislation. It is interesting to note and recall that the Auditor-General said no, he did not agree that we should accept that there would be technical difficulty with pieces of financial legislation. As those on this side have said during the day, we are not here debating a trifling law, some mere bagatelle; we are talking about the Self-Government Act, that is, the ACT's constitution. We are talking about the Financial Management Act, a piece of legislation which Mr Osborne has indicated confers on us a sacred trust to protect the taxpayers' money.

Much has been made today of the forestry loan defence. The Chief Minister and most of those on the other side claim that her Government's funding of the Bruce redevelopment was the same as the loan from the CFU to ACT Forests when Labor was in office. It is interesting, is it not, that when the Auditor was giving evidence to estimates, as we all recall, Mrs Carnell passed to him a list of transactions that she claimed were similar to the Bruce transaction and included the ACT Forests loan. Mr Hird asked the Auditor in estimates whether he was aware that loans had been made to ACT Forests under section 38 of the FMA. The Auditor replied, "No, Mr Hird, they haven't. They were made under the Audit Act, which preceded the FMA". The Auditor confirmed on 8 June that there was no requirement under that Act for payments from trust accounts to be appropriated. The only loan he found of a similar nature to the Bruce transaction from the list that the Chief Minister gave him, seeking to score some cheap point off the Auditor-General, was the CanDeliver loan in which the Auditor-General discovered that $500,000 paid to CanDeliver in the same year was also in breach of the legislation.

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