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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2044 ..

MR HARGREAVES: All right. I beg your pardon. I am corrected by the minister for health. I accept his correction because he is right. It is actually 10 per cent. The figure in fact was $6,423,000 on the reconciliation, and the true figure in Budget Paper No 4-I am assuming it to be the truth because that is the amount we have been asked to appropriate-is $6,523,000. So it is a $100,000 error, and yet I am presented with a perfectly balanced reconciliation. I cannot see how, for the life of me, it can work. Mr Speaker, I am using that as an example to show, first, that the minister has not the faintest idea of what is happening with the GST and what we have to pay, and, secondly, that his work in advising the Estimates Committee of a response to a question on notice was sloppy in the extreme. It was extremely sloppy.

I would like now to talk about the report. The Treasurer spent probably 12 of his 15 minutes attacking the committee's report, yet threaded right the way through this report are comments and sometimes quotes from the Treasurer indicating that he has not got a clue what is going on. I would like to wander through the report a little bit and have a look. Before I do that, the Treasurer made some points earlier on about there being a three-stage process and that he did not think it was working. We all know that he is going to abandon the draft budget process. I am not surprised because I laid the corruption of that particular process at his feet. If you look at page 31 of the Estimates Committee report, Mr Speaker, you will see that Mr Humphries informed the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety that there was an additional $1.5 million. That in itself says that we did not have to stick to the bottom line. (Extension of time granted.) I thank members. This just shows that the process applied to the Justice and Community Safety Committee did not apply to the other committees, and the whole system was corrupted.

I also draw attention to paragraph 7.4 of the Estimates Committee's report which talks about crime prevention programs, loosely described as the minister's slush fund. In answer to a question about how the money, $1.292 million, was to be spent-again I draw attention to the accuracy of the figure; there is $2,000 on the end-the minister said this:

He went on to say that one of the good ideas is a subsidy scheme of some sort to provide for the installation of car alarm devices. When we asked if he would come back to the committee, he said this:

Later in his speech the minister went on to criticise the criticisms of the beat police. Mr Speaker, I found that a bit rich. We know that the beat police program has been given $528,000. We also know that the recommendation of the Standing Committee on Justice and Community Safety was to be picked up in accordance with the recommendation for $1.547 million. In the last few days we have been trying to find out just how on earth this system can be provided in the context of $528,000. I recall the minister saying that he was thinking about some kind of sponsorship. I assume he is talking about free accommodation and not about McDonalds' logos on policemen's arms underneath their

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