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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 139 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

very strongly. I notice that on this occasion the Government is getting one step away from this face-to-face contact with people. It now wants the committees to go into that consultation process that will take place next week.

Mr Kaine: If you want to know, go and talk to a committee.

MR WOOD: That is what is happening. We are doing that and I am not sure that it is a good move, although I think Mr Humphries says "I'll talk to anybody anyway", so we will get some duplication. I remember the number of bodies - I will not mention names but they are certainly in my mind - that mounted quite strong public campaigns to get their previous year's funding level restored. I remember the trips I made to certain places as they convinced us to change their level of funding. They were quite successful because I think the government of the day, the Labor Government, backtracked on a lot of those.

My point is that we were able to tell - certainly community bodies - exactly what the year had for them in financial terms. They resisted that. They had sufficient knowledge of that budget - more knowledge than they have with this budget - to mount those campaigns.

MR HUMPHRIES (Treasurer, Attorney-General and Minister for Justice and Community Safety) (4.09), in reply: To close the debate, Mr Speaker, I think Mr Wood was telling us that the many, many more details that I have referred to in my comments in question time were details provided not in written form, but orally, to - - -

Mr Wood: No, it was not that document that you have there.

MR HUMPHRIES: My invitation stands to Mr Wood to table the documents that contain more detail than is here that he or the government of the day provided to community groups. Mr Wood makes the quite accurate point that one cannot open this book, look in the index and find Conservation Council of the South East Region in Canberra and turn to the page that states how much money the council gets. But then again, neither does a budget finally presented either by this Government or for that matter by previous governments. They have always been documents which provide the thrust of a particular portfolio's work in the coming financial year and they provide, in some cases, particular initiatives in a particular area, which may have an impact on a particular organisation. But budgets do not, and should not, target particular organisations, except in rare cases.

I have no doubt that some organisations came to the door and were given special treatment by the former government - unions Mr Wood referred to, for example, were told about what particular things were in the budget for them. But we see our job a little bit differently. We discuss the broad parameters of the budget itself, not who is promised particular grants or concessions or wherever it might be in respect of decisions that are properly made within the framework of the budget. We discuss whom the budget benefits and whom it does not - where taxes fall, where charges fall, what outlays in programs ought to occur. That is the process that is worthy of full community debate - not behind closed doors. None of the meetings that the Labor Government had that day were open meetings; they were all meetings held - - -

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