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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 7 Hansard (29 June) . . Page.. 2227 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

There has also been an expansion in the number of questions asked in places such as Assembly committees and in the amount of correspondence between ministers' offices and other members' offices. Those matters also consume extraordinary amounts of dollars in resources every year. The other point to make is that these amounts are almost entirely generated outside the minister's office-that is, they are generated by factors outside the minister's control. If Mr Stefaniak has to sign 2,800 letters every year, it is not because he is writing himself letters or he is putting an ad in the lonely hearts column along the lines of: "Please send me a letter, I want to hear from somebody." I can assure members that we do not solicit this correspondence; it comes to us anyway.

The minister has not had 400 speeches written for him so that he can burst through the doors of P & C meetings or invade local scout halls just to spruik on some subject. These are speeches that he is asked to give in his capacity as minister. Mr Kaine well knows that because he had the same kind of volume of correspondence and requests for speeches and so on when he was in office, and I think he will find that the figures in those areas were not greatly different. I think he will find, if he goes back and checks the figures, that the level of support that was provided to him when he was Minister for Urban Services was not greatly different to what is being provided today to the present Minister for Urban Services.

MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, I seek the indulgence of the house to speak again very briefly.

Leave granted.

MR KAINE: It is no wonder that the minister for justice defends this issue because reference is made at page 219 of the budget paper to the minister's policy advice under the heading "Output Class 1: Policy Advice" at $4.657 million a year.

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Before we proceed further, I would like to welcome, and acknowledge the presence in the gallery of, members of the South African Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education led, I understand, by Professor Mayalula. Welcome to the ACT Assembly and indeed welcome to Canberra.

Proposed expenditure-Part 5-Treasury and Infrastructure, $19,715,000 (net cost of outputs), $14,891,000 (capital injection), $44,665,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $79,271,000.

MR QUINLAN (12.16): This is the area in the budget through which a lot more money travels. The revenue line is considerably higher because it incorporates a collection of fees and taxes, and also funds from the Commonwealth. It is in fact a core line in the budget.

The government has made a number of claims in the presentation of this budget and I want to refer to a couple of them. They claim that they inherited a loss of $349 million-I think that is the latest figure. There are two aspects to that figure. One is that it is a figure that occurred halfway through the first Carnell government and the other is that it is inflated. Because of what happened in the debate yesterday, one has to

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