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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 38 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I contest the view that this is the first, this is a unique budget, the first open public consultation. Rosemary Follett ran a budget for the Labor Government many years ago when we gave out many, many more details than this. Rosemary went out up-front and I recall Gary Humphries on the sidelines defending certain groups that were to suffer some changes, so I am sure it is not the first.

Mr Speaker, I was pretty perplexed by this comment that there were many, many more details provided by the former Government for its budget consultation process than those supplied by the present ACT Government. Members know full well what the Carnell Government has put on the table. It is a very thick set of documents. In fact, we have 182 pages in volume 1 and 505 pages in volume 2, making a total of 687 pages of fairly detailed information about what would be a budget if it were presented in this form to the Assembly later in the year.

So I hunted around for what the many, many more details were that were given out by the Follett Government before it brought down its budget. Mr Speaker, I found the many, many more details, and it is in this document. When I saw the two documents I thought there must be very, very fine typing in this one to match what is available in this one, but of course - - -

Mr Quinlan: I do not know about that.

MR HUMPHRIES: You are right, Mr Quinlan; no, there is not. Mr Speaker, there are 16 pages of a very, very broad-brush budget overview in the budget strategy statement issued by the then Treasurer in June of 1992. It was quite worthy of the then Government to have set out its statement of budget strategy in the way that it did. I do not quibble with that. There are some interesting statements in here which in fact are rather more interesting with the passage of time. I will quote a couple of bits from it. It says:

We must reduce the cost of delivering government services in order to sustain the services themselves. No area of expenditure can be quarantined in the search for increased efficiency.

Mr Moore: With the exception of education.

MR HUMPHRIES: Well, I will not go into that. It also says:

There is also no getting away from the inevitability that we must ... make the public sector more efficient.

I think that was the year that they put aside $17m for redundancies from the Public Service, which they have felt, obviously with hindsight, was a mistake. Mr Speaker, this was put out in the form of this statement. Well, it is a good statement but it certainly does not contain many, many more details.

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