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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (23 May) . . Page.. 1616 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

The government does agree with recommendation 16 and will release the Disability Services Advisory Council subcommittee report, subject to some minor deletions to avoid defamation action against its proponents. I expect to do that on Thursday of this week.

The government does not agree with recommendation 2 as it believes that the output-based approach of budget presentation provides vastly improved information compared with the previous program-budgeting approach. The government does not agree with recommendation 18, which recommends a redirection of funding proposed for the supervised injecting place trial to improve community drug education. I would remind members that the decision to proceed with the supervised injecting place was taken by a majority of members of the Assembly.

In summary, I believe that the government has listened to the committee and that, within the constraints of fiscal responsibility, the 2000-01 budget provides the ACT community with an excellent result in relation to health and community care. I thank the standing committee for its report and I recommend the government's response to the Assembly.

MR WOOD (5.04): The committee made a serious attempt to consider all the issues in the draft budget. I am pleased that the minister has accepted 13 of the 18 recommendations in whole or in part and I thank him for the serious effort he has made in return to examine our proposal.

It is interesting to note from the response of each of the ministers to the various committee reports that most of the recommendations have been accepted. That seems a little at odds with Mr Humphries' persistent complaints that the committees did not take the process seriously. We certainly did point out the limitations. I know that in the case of my committee we did not have anything like the staff to handle the detail that is necessary in budget preparation.

I am sure that my colleagues will welcome the growth funding that Mr Moore referred to. I will not make any more specific comment because I will have to go and look at the papers and see the detail of that. The response of the government on the safe injecting room was expected. Indeed, I was one who did not agree with the committee as a whole. I do not know how often the chair of a committee does not agree with the committee's report. It was only in relation to one aspect of that report.

I will finish by saying, as I started, that the three committee members set about their task quite seriously and presented a report that we thought had merit.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

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