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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (13 February) . . Page.. 30 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

get volatility at the bottom line. We have seen, as I have said, an estimated $3 million deficit turn into an $87 million surplus in one year. We then saw a budget come down for a $4 million surplus and the government has changed that to, at the last announcement, a $35.5 million surplus. That is what the Acting Treasurer, Mr Smyth, said. The Acting Treasurer was still back on a $4 million surplus, but maybe he does not read his papers. At this point in time, except for a press release from the Chief Minister and Treasurer, we do not know what our bottom line will be for this year.

The thing that concerns me is that, if the reporting cycle is like the one for last financial year, we will not know the results for the current financial year until after the next election. If the government is to be honest, it has to bring its estimates up to date. We take pride in the fact that we have a system of monthly reporting to the Assembly, but that monthly reporting does not appear to contain much information. The expenditure seems to come at a rush at the end of the year when we do a bit of catch-up accounting, so all the other monthly reports are inadequate in terms of expenditure recognised. Further, the estimated outcome for the year is not revised with any consistency either.

If we are going to have information flow to this Assembly, let it be useful and accurate information. It is about time that the government recognised that, if the administration is putting out monthly and quarterly financial reports, it is duty bound to bring the estimates involved in that up to date so that at least we know and the people of Canberra know what the numbers are and we can go into an election year with some modicum of information that the government has at hand.

There are recommendations about reporting on borrowing because some of the presentation is confusing. I do not know why we picked on borrowing, because a lot of the presentation is confusing. I will not go into too many of those. We did recommend that the government improve its transparency in the process of allocating funds in the so-called social capital program. That was done in response to objections raised by community organisations. It has to be said again that this government does not have a good relationship with the NGOs, the community organisations, out there. You have only to ask them, Mr Moore.

We have had changes to the administrative orders and we have had changes to the bureaucracy. If the government wishes to change the administrative orders or wishes to rearrange its bureaucracy, it is also duty bound to recast its budget so that the budget that we are looking at is in line with the likely annual reports that we are going to get at the end of the day. Each year I have been here there has been an inability to relate reports coming through with the budget that has been set down. Like a lot of the things that have been done in this place, there is more show than go in the processes of this government.

We recommended that the Auditor-General be asked to conduct, effectively, a performance audit on the government's performance measures and to see whether they are, in fact, truly indicative of what is happening within any part of the administration. Coincidentally, subsequent to this report being prepared, several of us attended the biennial conference of the Australasian Council of Public Accounts Committees and the same question arose-just how good are performance measures?-and it seems that governments are putting out a whole lot of numbers, but

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