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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 10 Hansard (13 October) . . Page.. 3036 ..

Mr Berry: Table the assessment.

MR HUMPHRIES: The information I have is in the form of this speech, Mr Berry, and you can have that when my speech is finished. If you want to refer the matter to a committee and get the committee to examine the department on the costs, I am quite happy for you to do that. If you want the information, you have to ask for it in a form in which we can provide it.

Mr Berry: No, you have to argue your case here, Minister, sorry.

MR HUMPHRIES: I am arguing my case here and I am telling you what my department - - -

Mr Berry: Give us the details.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Stop interjecting. Let Mr Humphries get on with it, please.

Mr Berry: He persists in having a conversation with me, so I am happy to - - -

MR SPEAKER: You interjected to begin with, Mr Berry.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, I have indicated to members of the Assembly the figures that the department has given to me. I have to say to members that you would have to expect that to be able to refine to a degree that we are not presently refining projections of demand for services from information available in any earlier part of the year would cost something. We are asking people to try to work out, essentially, in September what it will cost for the delivery of services till the end of June. We do not try to do that at the moment because we do not need to. There is no requirement to do that. No-one demands that we project that. We put a budget together based on previous years' figures. We have some idea of what the demand has been in previous years. We factor in other things we know about, such as population increases or, in the case of health, epidemics or whatever it might be. We factor that into projecting how much we need to spend or to do in a particular field, in a particular area of government output. We put our budget together on that basis.

We are now being asked to do something more, that is, to take the figures available to us on what is actually happening for the given financial year to date and extrapolate those to the end of the year in some kind of meaningful way. We could, of course, spend rather less than $100,000 on doing that, but the quality of that projection would be commensurately much less useful. Also, we have to bear in mind that spending $100,000 in, say, September on projecting an outcome for the end of the financial year is paying quite a lot of money for information which would be substantially out-of-date by the time we receive it. In the hypothesis of a January draft budget, we would have information available in January which is relying on what was the case back in September and projected, basically, from September, perhaps with other information added which is not necessarily going to be up-to-date but is going to be partial information. We have to expect in those circumstances that there will be some question mark about just what quality there will be with those figures.

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