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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4079 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

For the reasons that Ms Tucker has just dealt with, no matter what any member of this place says in any committee, it will not change the bottom line of the budget one cent. The wording of Mr Humphries' motion is quite specific, and it has been written that way for a good reason. What we are supposed to do is make recommendations that maintain or improve the operating result. In other words, the Government is not sure that it can do that, so it is giving it to all the rest of us in the hope that we can do what the Government has been unable to do - produce an optimal budget. All we can do is venture an opinion, and we have to work with the figures that are given to us.

What the Government can do at the end of the day, and it will - the Treasurer and Deputy Chief Minister has made it clear in recent debates in this place - is attempt to make the Assembly responsible for this budget. It will not be their budget. When it goes wrong, it will not be their budget, and they will say that every member of this place had the opportunity to make an input to this budget. They will say, "It is, therefore, your budget, not our budget". If they come out with a good end of the year operating result, they will say, "See what a good budget we produced". If they come out at the end of the year with a bad operating result, they will say, "But it is your budget. It wasn't our budget, it was yours". Of course, that, clearly, is not so.

Unless the Government is going somehow to change the concept of ministerial and executive responsibility, this budget remains theirs no matter what they do. They can go through a pretence of consultation. They can introduce a system which is, in a sense, no different from what estimates committees have done every year in this place for the last 10 years.

Mr Humphries says that this is the most open process of any government anywhere in the world. I think that, more or less, paraphrases what he said. Well, it is not. It is no more open than any budget that has ever been presented in this place, and, of course, any input that we make will have no more impact than any input we have tried to make over the last 10 years.

It is simply a case, Mr Speaker, of the Government trying to have it both ways. They want to try to get themselves off the hook in terms of responsibility for the budget, while imposing such constraints on us that we cannot change the budget in any sensible or practical way. For that reason, I have real reservations.

I note also, with interest, that the Government is claiming that they are doing this because it was mentioned in the report on governance of the ACT. They are very good at picking out from the governance report the things that happen to suit them and setting the rest of it aside. I note that that report and the report of Mr Osborne's committee and the Government's response to it have not yet been debated in this place. So on what basis is the Government saying we are doing this because the governance committee recommended it? That was a recommendation, but the Assembly has not debated it yet. The Assembly certainly has not adopted any of the recommendations in that report yet, but we are having this sort of thing foisted on us as though it is somehow good, somehow sacrosanct, and we are obliged to accept it and obliged to do just what the Government wants us to do - rubber-stamp their budget and then at the end of the day be held accountable for not their budget but our budget.

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