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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 977 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

its committees. There was the time, there was the capacity, and I hope there will be at least one or two committees which will have taken up that task in a serious way and which will make recommendations that do accord - - -

Mr Quinlan: It depends on who chairs them, does it not, Gary?

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Quinlan interjects. He says that it depends on who chairs them. I think he summarises there pretty well what the answer is. It is not a question of time or resources; it is a question of philosophical approach to the exercise. Some members took the philosophical approach that this exercise was not going to work, and they made sure it did not work, by approaching it in a way which did not allow the budget to be given that kind of consideration which the Assembly's resolution in the last sitting period suggested that it should have.

Mr Speaker, the proof of that is that some committees, I gather, will be reporting in terms of the Assembly's parameters and some will not. I am rather surprised that we have in this report of the Finance and Public Administration Committee a list of concerns raised by the community, things the community feels should have a priority placed on them in the budget. Page after page of these comments have been made in this report, and the committee has basically said in respect of all of them, "Sorry, we cannot form an opinion about these things, because we are not playing the game that the Assembly has told us to play. We are not abiding by the rules that the Assembly has given us for producing our report".

Organisations have said, "We believe we have a good case for increased funding". What is more, this committee had the means to be able to fund at least some of these proposals. I wrote to the Finance and Public Administration Committee and said to it, "Here are some policy considerations to do with taxation issues which the Government is considering". In the spirit of the draft budget, I wrote to them and said, "Here are the issues". In effect, I was saying, "If you decide to make decisions in your committee that we should take certain steps in terms of taxation issues, revenue issues, then you will produce amounts of money which are available to spend on the sorts of issues that the community is raising before your committee".

I put it on the record that the committee wrote back to me and said, "The issues you have raised are basically matters that we do not feel we are able to deal with. It is a matter for the Government. You consider it". So we have the simultaneous views that spending more money on certain issues was too complex and too difficult for the committee to consider, and on the other side of the ledger proposals that would give it the money to spend on those issues were also too complex and too difficult for the committee to consider.

At the end of the day, we have this report, which makes a number of estimates-type comments on presentation and format and further work the Government should go away and do but makes no serious attempt to give the Government clues about how, based on this very large amount of community consultation that took place, it should go away and construct a better budget. If I was one of those community organisations which submitted to this committee, I would feel fairly disappointed that my effort was cast aside.

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