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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 10 Hansard (13 October) . . Page.. 3054 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

If that is how she has operated, no wonder she has had to pass the mantle to somebody else. What we want is the Government's best estimate of what the outputs will be for the current year when we are receiving the budget for the next year. That is going to be the greatest indicator of the capacity of the administration to produce. We can have a department that half way through the year informs us that they have spent half their budget. They would be, by the standards of the former Treasurer and the standards of Mr Humphries and Mr Smyth, on budget.

But if they had not produced what was promised for that money, 50 per cent of the money and 50 per cent of the time, then they are not on budget. I think Mr Smyth has just showed his simplistic view of this. He actually accused people in this place of not understanding the process, while clearly demonstrating that he had not a clue himself. If I can borrow words from a former Prime Minister of this nation, "Silly boy". Dollar projections by themselves do not mean anything.

It devolves to nonsense if you do not know what you have got for it. You send someone out with a pocketful of money to bring home a certain amount of hardware, whatever it might be, and you ask them, "Did you spend all the money?". "Yes". "Oh, well, everything is fine". Or would you actually count what they brought home? If you are trying to project into the next year, would you not like to know the current information, the best intelligence on value for money on output in the prevailing year?

Those people over there are right to the extent that they say, "Some of the estimates you might get might be unchanged". I expect that. However, some of those estimates may be different. Unexpected events may have occurred to indicate that the budget is not going to come out with exactly the money spent and exactly the projected outputs received. That is common sense. I think it is fair to assume that not all of the unexpected events in a financial year occur on 30 June.

It is highly likely that they occur throughout the year. It is highly likely that the Government is kept informed of those events. If they are not, then they ought to resign now, because they are not doing their jobs. If we do not have Ministers who are regularly monitoring the expenditure of their department and its output performance, then they should resign. There are a couple of them today who have indicated by their approach to this debate that apparently they are not doing that. I suggest they take a good hard look.

We heard from Mr Humphries that this will cost the princely sum of $100,000 - valuable resources consumed. I have a question. The Government happily imposes this year unilaterally the draft budget system. What is that going to cost? Is there any member of this house who believes that that process is other than a political exercise on the part of the Government to forestall criticism of the budget when it is finally brought down? I doubt it.

The Government is prepared to spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars on that exercise. The Government is also prepared to considerably inconvenience the non-government members of this house because of the timing of that draft budget, and

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