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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4070 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

minority; a parliament dominated at the expense of what, in this case, would be a significant minority, Mr Speaker, if this Assembly agrees to this proposition today.

Mr Speaker, I think most members would be aware from their discussions on the various standing committees of the Assembly which they sit on that there is a widespread concern that this is an unworkable and unreasonable proposal. It is unworkable because at the end of the day the standing committees of this Assembly do not have the resources to properly consider the type of detail that the Treasurer is asking us to consider in this motion today.

Is the Treasurer seriously putting forward the proposal that we can assess the appropriations in each individual output from each individual department for which the standing committees have responsibility? I give as an example, Mr Speaker, the committee that I sit on, the Standing Committee on Urban Services. The Standing Committee on Urban Services, if this proposal goes ahead, potentially will have to consider each individual appropriation in each output area for the Department of Urban Services. The Department of Urban Services is a very large department. Is the Treasurer seriously arguing that that standing committee will have the capacity to decide whether or not there is satisfactory revenue being put into services such as Canberra's urban parks, or waste collection, or litter picking, or any other number of the myriad services, and perhaps more significant services such as housing, public transport, the environment, planning and land management? If he is, then this proposal can only be described as a joke, because there is no way, and members here know it - if they will not admit it they know it in their hearts - that we will be able even to attempt to properly scrutinise those types of expenditure proposals. That is the first fundamental problem.

If we were going to be able to accept this type of proposal from the Treasurer today we should have seen an equivalent proposal from him to provide improved resourcing to the committee office to do the job properly; but we have not seen that. We get a proposition from the Treasurer which requires us to do a round the world journey, visiting every country in the world, in a Mini Minor. That is the type of analogy I would like to draw. We are trying to get around the world, including going across the oceans, in a Mini Minor, through our committee system. It is an absurd proposition from this Government.

Mr Speaker, the other and equally concerning issue that arises out of the Treasurer's proposition today is that he is asking the standing committees of the Assembly basically to sign away their rights to properly consider the Government's budget proposals. As Ms Tucker quite rightly points out, he is saying, "We not only will ask you to consider these particular issues, but also ask you to consider them in this particular type of way; only consider them in relation to maintaining or improving the operating result". Without being able to take a global approach, which is available through the Estimates Committee process, we are not going to be able to properly do our jobs.

We are not going to be able to do it because we are going to have to look at expenditure in Urban Services divorced from expenditure across the rest of government. If this motion is successful the Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration will be looking at the global result, but not looking at expenditure in individual departments. The divorcing of the two areas is completely inappropriate.

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