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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 975 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

The net result after all this time is that the outputs, the committee reports, are so hedged with qualifications, doubts and reservations as to be largely, I submit, of little value to the Government in formulating its formal budget, which it is now bound to put on the table very soon. This is exemplified in the dissenting reports. We have three reports on the table today - and one has yet to be tabled formally - and three dissenting reports. That indicates that many of the people on these committees were not happy with the process, they were not happy with the result and they do not feel that they can get behind the recommendations the committees attempted to make.

What value do these reports have? In one case, Mr Speaker, as you are well aware, one member totally dissociated himself from the report. He said he thought the whole thing was a mistake and he could not commit himself to anything in the report - not one word, not one paragraph, not one recommendation. To me, that puts real question marks on the value of this process.

Permeating all of this were the concerns about the GST. I do not think we know now what the impact is going to be. In fact, I do not think the Government knows. So I am not too sure how the committees could deal with this matter without knowing what the outcomes were likely to be.

Despite all of those reservations, Mr Speaker, despite all the problems and the shortcomings in the system as I see it, we persisted. Most of us have tried honestly, I submit, to get a useful result. I do not think we succeeded. Frankly, I doubt that the experiment will be repeated next year, unless we can be much clearer on what the process is and what its purpose is.

So much for the process. As to the draft budget, I think I can honestly say and I believe you, Mr Speaker, can honestly say that we have done our best to make something out of it. We have not shirked it. We have not pushed the problems aside. We have produced a report that shows that we looked fairly thoroughly at the issues. We went into the assumptions and the variability of those assumptions. We looked at the budget base. We looked at the bottom line. We looked at important issues such as superannuation and GST. Unusually for committees, we came up with some budget positives. We think the Government has done one or two good things in that part of the draft budget that we looked at.

We also had some criticisms which we went into in some detail. We thought that there were some things the Government needed to look at. They include how rates are determined and collected, whether the emergency services levy should continue, the funding of InTACT, how much money is spent on giving the Government policy advice, the establishment of the new executive support and policy group, and the implications of the fact that some $40m in round figures is spent by the Government each year on policy advice. It seems a very large sum of money. Perhaps the Government ought to be convincing us that the money is well spent and we are getting a return for it.

Finally, Mr Speaker, we have attempted to present a fairly detailed outline of the community's input into this process. The best we could do with that was to refer the community's opinions to the Government, since we were not able to make any recommendations about giving them more money. It is a matter for the consideration of

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