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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 10 Hansard (13 October) . . Page.. 3043 ..

MR HARGREAVES: Thanks for the entertainment, Mr Humphries; I appreciate it. We have got off on a really good footing today. Thanks very much for the light humour. I wish to refer to undertakings that Mr Humphries, in his capacity as Minister for Justice, has given on transparency, openness and accountability in relation to the new prison that we are going to get and his commitment to making sure that people do not hide behind commercial-in-confidence protections. There seemed to me to be a willingness on his part to say that, where we have significant expenditure, significant outputs and significant outcomes, all those people who have a need to know something can get the information easily. After all, Canberra is supposed to be the clever, caring capital and the Government is supposed to be a clever, caring government. We know how clever it is!

The technology is available for the extrapolation of this sort of information. When I was asking for a breakdown of the expenditure within the Emergency Services Bureau, I was told that it could not be done. Perhaps the real reason for the Government not wanting to provide the information is, in fact, that they do not know how to use the systems already in existence which can provide that information. The Oracle system, for example, is quite capable of doing it.

Mr Smyth had a go at my colleague Mr Berry about having to extrapolate information on three or four things. What an absolute load of fiction that was. One of the reasons the hospital is in so much dire trouble and has been for quite some time is that the financial managers extrapolate figures using straight line budgeting. They get all the magic figures and extrapolate them in a straight line, and then we have the pieces of fiction that the Minister for Health comes out with, saying, "The world is going to end on Thursday because the hospital is going to be $10m overspent". Lo and behold - with a click of the fingers - the following month it is only going to be $7m over. Why do you think that is? It is because he has used a straight line budget to suit himself.

The hospital has been there since 1974. I can tell you that that is a reasonable period in which to have developed the seasonal ebbs and flows of your budget. Any suggestion that the accrual accounting process might interfere with that sort of business is a load of fiction as well. It can be done. We have the technology. We talk about how much money it would cost us to report in this way. It would be interesting to know how much money has been spent by the hospital system particularly and the government system generally on developing its financial reporting systems.

I do not believe, for example, that the ACT Government's financial reporting system could be anywhere near as poor as those of the Australian Federal Police in their reporting to us on our policing arrangements. I could not possibly believe that. Having worked within it, I can tell you that it is pretty good. Only an incompetent finance manager cannot tell you how his budget and how his outputs and outcomes have progressed over the last four or five years and give you a reasonably accurate forecast on where they are going. If we have a clever government and a clever Public Service, I do not see how they cannot do it. I do not believe that at all.

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