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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 215 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The first phase was the establishment of a select committee on budget parameters for 2001-02, which met last year and reported in December. The government expects to respond shortly to the recommendations made in that report. The second phase is now the referral of the draft budget and issues which have this week been tabled by the government to the general purpose standing committees of the Assembly.

Members of those committees will be aware that I wrote to all general purpose standing committees, inviting them to take part in the budget process in such a way as to contribute to discussion and debate about the priorities laid out and full new expenditure. I have to record that one committee, the Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration, wrote back to me indicating that it was prepared to undertake that inquiry. However, other committees indicated that they had a concern about the limitation the standing orders placed on their capacity to undertake such an inquiry when it might be considered to be outside their terms of reference.

Mr Speaker, for that reason, today I bring forward the motion on the table at the moment to provide for consideration of those issues in such a way that standing orders are not offended. We cannot have standing orders offended, can we? This motion refers the initiatives to the Assembly committees, but it provides the Assembly committees with an option.

Members will recall that there was concern-and this was reflected in the recommendations of the budget parameters committee-that there would be differential treatment of the budget recommendations and budget initiatives by the different committees, and the subcommittees might choose not to take part in the process at all. Therefore, what the government is doing in this motion is offering each standing committee a choice. Every standing committee receives the initiatives under this proposal, both the initiatives for spending and the initiatives for capital works; indeed, the entire capital works program. The committees have the choice of reporting on those initiatives or of declining to take part in such an inquiry and making no conclusion about the initiatives referred to it.

I am going to take each of those proposals in turn. The first of those proposals is based on the reality that the process will work only if committees operate within the global budget that is allocated to each portfolio. If people choose to say, "We note the priorities the government has brought forward, but we have a shopping list of our own," and decline to marry the two, then the process clearly will not work. The exercise would not work at all in that situation. I address my comments here, I suppose, more to the crossbenchers.

I believe that people in the ACT and members of the crossbench, in particular, want to see a process work whereby governments do, on a regular basis, put their proposals for their budgets out on the table for scrutiny and comment by the public of the ACT. I have no doubt that, after the first round of this exercise, there is strong community support for that. Indeed, all the community groups that we spoke to-the Council of Social Service and other stakeholders in education and in health-said that they wanted to see this process continue in some form, although they recommended some changes should take place.

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