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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 974 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

I think it is fair to say that many of us, perhaps even some members of the Government, have approached this exercise with real reservations. I made it clear in December, when the motion was debated by the Assembly, that I had real reservations about it, and I explained why, but I also said that I would give it my best because I thought it was worth a try, in all fairness to the Government. I think today I can claim that I have met that obligation.

Part of the problem with this experiment is that the rules of the game were, and still remain largely to this moment, undefined. How were we to go about this process? We tended to make up the rules as we went along. I imagine that each committee made up a different set of rules for itself in the absence of any clear guidelines as to what the process was supposed to be. Indeed, the question that has run through my mind is: What was the purpose of this exercise? What did the Government expect to achieve by referring a draft budget to the various committees of this place? Was it just a charade? Was it just an attempt to demonstrate how consultative and open the Government was? Was it a genuine attempt to get a better budget?

After engaging in the process for some weeks, I am still not clear just what the purpose of the process was. That probably explains why I still have the feeling that we needed some clearly defined guidelines and rules as to where we could go and how far we could go. Importantly, the starting point - this document called a draft budget - was considerably lacking in clarity and certainty. The Minister himself identified the fact that the base parameters were changed. At a stage when the Government itself had probably put only eight to 10 weeks into the development of its budget, with parameters that it was acknowledged were going to be variable, the draft budget was put to us and we were expected to make something out of it.

On reflection, the draft appears to be a little more than the basic forward estimates from the 1999-2000 budget; that is, it was a beginning point for a budget. It was not a progress point in the development of a budget. The Government had not moved some way towards developing its budget and was not handing it over to us to be massaged. It was just the beginning point for the next year's budget. The bottom line appeared to be variable, because it became clear during our inquiries that an additional $21.3m was available from the Commonwealth, although this bottom line was not variable in the hands of the committees.

There were some tacit rules. One of them was that the committees could not change the bottom line. If the committees could not change the bottom line, and if the committees could not contemplate cross-portfolio implications - and I do not see how they could have been expected to do so - then what scope did the committees have to improve the draft budget in the form in which it came to us? All of this led to some reticence on the part of committees. They were not sure of what the rules were. They had a document that was only partially defined. Some rings were put around what we could and could not do, although by and large the operating rules had not been defined. As time went by some of us became perhaps even concerned rather than reserved about what the process was intended to produce and what value the output could have.

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