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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 1988 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

appointment of the committee were. That is not work done by the committee. You are holding up the wrong page.

Mr Hargreaves: Turn the page, Mr Humphries.

MR HUMPHRIES: I did turn the page.

Mr Hargreaves: Turn it again, because your eyesight fails you.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Hargreaves holds up the page with the resolution of appointment. That is the work of the Assembly, not of the committee.

Mr Hargreaves: I have been Gary-ed, Mr Speaker; it is the following page.

MR HUMPHRIES: Yes, that is right. The following page has five sentences. There was a 20 per cent blowout in the cost of running two important programs of government and the Estimates Committee came up with a five-sentence report.

Mr Hargreaves: Hold your water, Gary; it is coming.

MR HUMPHRIES: I am sure that it is, but where is it?

Mr Hargreaves: Go to lunch and come back and find out.

MR HUMPHRIES: There is going to be another report, is there? Mr Speaker, I am sorry, this is not good enough. Where was the questioning by the Estimates Committee of the Treasurer, the Minister for Urban Services or the Attorney-General of the elements that made up Appropriation Bill 1999-2000 (No 3)? The committee, as members can clearly see, was charged with the task of considering that appropriation bill. Members of this place have insisted in the past that there be an Estimates Committee for every appropriation bill brought down. We said that we would have one and we had one. Where is the work? I will read the relevant sentence from this report:

Mr Speaker, that is not the only thing that might be said about this Estimates Committee report in terms of the sloppiness evident in this work. This document is full of mistakes. It is full of evidence that the committee gave insufficient time and effort to considering the issues being raised and decided simply to trot out the rhetoric that had been brought up in countless press releases before the committee even sat and, most importantly, failed to address the critical issues in this budget. The big issues in this budget which have been part of the broader community debate have been almost totally overlooked in this report. I think it is a pathetic effort. I think the members of the committee should be ashamed about the lack of work that has gone into this report.

The report is full of mistakes, Mr Speaker. Let me start with just the first few pages. There are comments here on the GST. There are questions that are not suitably answered. I am the Treasurer and I went before the committee. I had very few questions about the

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