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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2039 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

How does this add value to the process of drawing up a budget, or delivering and voting on a budget later this week? Here we have recommendation after recommendation slagging the government, saying in effect, "You people are being mean and niggardly with the money in the territory." This report slags the government for not funding X, Y and Z. There is no possibility of those issues being taken up in the context of the debate to start tomorrow afternoon, and they say this is constructive criticism. What is constructive about it? It is a complete and utter abrogation of the duty which the committee owes to do its job properly and to add value to the processes.

I ask members to go back and look at Estimates Committee reports of seven, eight, nine or 10 years ago. At that stage there were lots of comment about the structure of budgets, about presentation, about addressing issues, and about looking at the way in which we were dealing with emerging requirements in the early days of self-government. There were lots of those sorts of comments in the reports then.

For the most part, committees did not get into the business of saying, "Yes, anyone who wants to make a complaint about the budget, come through our door and we will write up your complaint; we will present a report saying that we support your getting more money." They did not, for the most part, do that. Sometimes there were calls for the government to fund more things, but generally they avoided that sort of "everyone-come-through-the-door, and everyone-gets-a-mention-in-the-estimates-report" approach. It is very unfortunate that this report seems to abandon pretty well 10 years of good practice with the drawing up of Estimates Committee reports and that the committee has gone for this process.

There are a number of things in this report which simply do not make sense. I have already said that there are a number of simple inaccuracies in the report. It tells us that we should fund the Welfare Rights Centre and the Women's Legal Centre because we do not provide any funding, for example, to the Welfare Rights Centre, conveniently overlooking the fact that there is $105,000 that goes to the centre from the Department of Education and Community Services in grants every year. Why doesn't the committee know that fact? The answer is that they did not ask.

I was before the committee for two full days as Treasurer and then as Attorney-General. In fact, I was there for 21/2 days, because I think I came back to do the AFP, and hundreds and hundreds of questions were asked. Then the committee decided to run issues in the report which apparently were the particular axe to grind of individual members without actually going back and asking the relevant questions when examining the witnesses. That is not good enough.

Mr Speaker, there are contradictions in the report. Let me give you an example of it. Mr Quinlan, in his comments earlier today, criticised the proposal for beat police in the ACT, saying that he thinks it is a bad idea because it was apparently, and I quote his words, "a bottom up proposal", which is not the right way of going about things. It should not have been a bottom up approach; it should have come from senior management or people at the top. That, at least, is the impression I got of what he was saying.

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