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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 10 Hansard (13 October) . . Page.. 3037 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Members will have them but will have to ask themselves whether they are actually as useful as they ought to be for the purposes of meaningful debate or elucidation of the community. Including this information in budget papers, in effect, is likely to cause confusion for the Estimates Committee and for members of the Assembly. There will be a difference between the budget papers and the quarterly performance reports, obviously, and possibly large differences between the estimated outcome in the budget papers and the actual outcome in the annual reports.

Members will have, I suspect, a very distinct difference in what they are seeing in these end-of-year projections that they are seeking in this amendment Bill from what they will have in the annual reports, which will be the accurate assessment of what has happened in the financial year. The Estimates Committee could be bogged down in understanding the differences between those various documents, with further work for agencies in having to explain why projections have been reached, which might be hard to explain in terms of what is the projected outcome in a budget for a particular financial year.

A meaningful comparison of end-of-year output results against the budget targets is more suited to the annual reports of each department. That is an established process. We have the Assembly committee system, which will scrutinise the end-of-year results against the budget targets and determine whether the projection that a government has made for what it needs to spend in a given year is accurate and reasonable or whether a government has made errors in the way in which it has gone about that exercise. I think any attempt to duplicate that effort earlier, much earlier, in the budget process would be a considerable expenditure of resources and I do not believe that the benefit of doing that has been made out in the speech Mr Quinlan has given so far. The value added as a result of this process would be quite minimal, at a considerable cost, and would be of little use to the Estimates Committee and non-Executive members of the Assembly.

The issue of the efficiency and effectiveness of the Financial Management Act is currently before a committee of this Assembly to consider. The amendment would be premature in that respect. I think that arguably that matter should be considered by the committee examining the Financial Management Act. I do not think that entailing the cost of this additional work at this stage is warranted, given the case that has been made for it. I appreciate that this proposal has followed on from a recommendation of the Estimates Committee last financial year and I appreciate that it is likely to get the support of most members. I put on record for members that there is a cost associated with all these measures.

People might think that asking for information is a process without any down side. You may feel that it is always appropriate to have more information. What harm can there be in having more information? Already the Assembly has unprecedented levels of information about budgets and other activities of government. The question here is whether that extra information actually produces any worthwhile demonstrated community benefit, because the community pays for those additional outputs. Mr Speaker, I ask members to consider carefully whether the costs associated with this measure are really justifiable in terms of the benefit to be obtained.

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