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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 933 ..

MR HUMPHRIES: I was corresponding with the chair of the committee to address the concerns he raised about the issues that committee was facing. That is perfectly reasonable and I would do so for any committee which chose to approach me, as would any of the other Ministers, I am sure.

Mr Stefaniak: I would be delighted to get an approach like that.

MR HUMPHRIES: Indeed. Of course, it did not happen. There were no approaches on the part of other committees to the responsible Ministers. There were no approaches and there was no attempt on the part of the committees to try to work out for themselves how they would reorder priorities. That was the task that you were given and you seemed to find it very difficult to contemplate that task.

Mr Quinlan: Mr Acting Speaker, I take a point of order on relevance. We have before us a report on the education portfolio and I think that Mr Humphries is delivering a speech on the Justice Committee.

MR ACTING SPEAKER: There is no point of order. It is a broad matter of principle.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Acting Speaker, I will confine my comments to the Education Committee. That committee did not approach me or the Education Minister, saying, "Help us to reorder priorities in this portfolio", which is the task that they were given by the Assembly. That is quite clear. That is there on the record and the report reflects that fact. There is no attempt in this report to identify a reordering of priorities. On the point of not having the resources to be able to second-guess the Government, I remind members of this Assembly that the Liberal Party in opposition in 1994 actually produced a draft budget to answer the comment that we were prepared to criticise without being constructive. We said, "Okay, we will produce a draft budget", and we did. We did so with no more resources - in fact, fewer resources - than members currently have in opposition. (Extension of time granted)

I remind members that the education committee - I know that this applied to other committees as well - was offered extra resources to help it to identify the work that it needed to do to meet the task that the Assembly had set for the committee. Did the committee take up that offer? Apparently not.

Ms Tucker: Do you know why? I will explain later.

MR HUMPHRIES: No doubt, Ms Tucker will answer that question. Do not tell us that the resources were not there because they were offered to you and they were not availed of. Even if they were not availed of, we managed to produce a draft budget in 1994. Mr Kaine will recall that exercise because he was part of that process. In fact, we drew on that draft budget for the first budget that we presented in government in 1995; so it is possible to do. It does not involve magic or smoke and mirrors; it involves simple hard work - work which the Education Committee apparently was not prepared to do.

I want to make some comments on the GST impact which the committee has referred to in comments. The committee has commented - effectively, it is a de facto recommendation; it was not prepared to indicate how it would fund it, but it was

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