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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2043 ..

MR HARGREAVES: Mr Speaker, I would like to give you an example of a sloppy piece of work that has come from the Treasurer and which was part of the estimates process. Therein lies the relevance. In the estimates hearing I asked the minister and his officials about the amount of GST that was payable for police services in the AFP contract. I observed blank looks from the minister because he did not have a clue what I was talking about, but his officials, to their credit, took the information away. I gave them 15 minutes notice and they came back and said they would take the question on notice. They duly came back and, under the minister's signature, they provided me with a reconciliation of two documents. Budget Paper No 2, at page 16, has an amount of $65.3 million allocated to the Australian Federal Police. Budget Paper No 4, at page 236, has $71.3 million. The difference is the amount of GST we would need to pay for AFP services.

I am aware that in some cases you have to allocate it out into the expenditure line and then reflect it back in the revenue line if it does not come back, because it wanders off to the Central Financing Unit. It is a very tortuous thing. As recently as 26 June the department of treasury said they had had no advice to say that this transaction, the payment of GST on behalf of police services, will not be attracting the GST and therefore there is no proposal to amend the Appropriation Bill 2000-2001. That emanated from a question I asked as a result of being told that we would not have to pay the GST on policing services because the difference between the $71.3 million in Budget Paper No 4 and the $65.3 million in Budget Paper No 2 was the GST that we would not have to pay. It was odd, Mr Speaker, that two budget papers printed on the same day contained in the same box different figures for the allocation for the AFP.

Naturally, when you see something like that, you ask questions and I was told that we do not have to pay it. Indeed, in the reconciliation provided to me and the response under the minister's signature it says, "GST not now payable." Well, if we do not have to pay it, Mr Speaker, why are we appropriating it? The answer, when I got it back from the Department of Treasury and Infrastructure, is that we do have to pay it. Mr Speaker, does the minister know whether we do have to pay it or we do not have to pay it? If you want to talk about being sloppy, perhaps the minister's concept of whether we do or do not have to pay GST on a $65 million bill constitutes sloppiness.

On top of that, if the minister and his advisers care to have a look at their advice to me in response to the question on notice they will note that under the minister's signature it says, "GST now not payable on the contract." I would like to know when it was discovered that it was not now payable. On top of that, the figure identified is $6,423,000. There is a very neat piece of reconciliation. It actually traces the original $71.3 million, more accurately described as $71,281,000, back to the $65,251,000 in Budget Paper No 2. That is a beautiful piece of reconciliation and everybody can see how it works, but there is one small problem with that-it does not agree with Budget Paper No 4, page 215, which identifies the GST as $6,523,000. Now, most people would just say, "Oh, well, it's point one of $1 million." In terms of service, Mr Speaker, it is $100,000. It is a $100,000 error.

Mr Moore: No. It is $10,000. Point one of $1 million is $10,000.

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