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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1176 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

and the recommendation is hardly of much value in the process of determining the 2001-02 budget.

Some of the recommendations are no more than statements of the obvious, such as the one about refinancing debt on more favourable terms-recommendation 18. Wow, we would never have thought of that one, would we? Let us refinance our debt on more favourable terms-what a good idea.

Other recommendations simply call for information to be provided-recommendations 13, 19 and 20. So the government's response includes the information requested, even though it is not relevant to the terms of reference. I suspect that in some cases it also was not asked for when the government appeared before the committee. Rather than say, "The government should tell us certain things," it might have been helpful if the committee had said when we were appearing before it, "Will you tell us certain things?" We could then have told them those things. They would not have needed to make that recommendation. As I said before, it looks incredibly similar to a filler designed to make it look as though the committee was doing its job.

As well as being off the track in most of its recommendations, the report also fills several pages with a recitation but no analysis of published material such as economic reviews and forecasts-all the way from page 9 to page 13 of the report. But the reason for these pages of recitation of economic reviews and forecasts is not explained. Attention is not drawn to it in the body of the report in any particularly meaningful way.

Of the 40 recommendations, not surprisingly, only eight are agreed with, and most of those endorse government policy rather than shed any new light on the broad parameters for the next budget. Twenty recommendations are noted, and those are generally statements of the obvious.

Mr Stanhope: Did you agree with all those recommendations, Harold?

MR SPEAKER: I warn you, Mr Stanhope.

MR HUMPHRIES: Five recommendations are simply irrelevant. They add nothing to the debate and they do not relate to the terms of reference the Assembly agreed to.

I ask members to take an analogous situation. If the government was asked to produce a report on something and produced a report which bore no relationship to what the Assembly had asked, I can think of at least five people in this place who would be immediately moving motions of censure in the government. Yet when an Assembly committee does exactly the same thing, people snigger and joke. They think it is all a great hoot, forgetting that the taxpayer meets the cost of Assembly committee inquiries.

Seven of the recommendations are not agreed to, usually because they reflect ignorance of what is possible (recommendations 21 and 40) or are based on incorrect assumptions (recommendations 22 and 39).

In summary, there is not much to say beyond that about this report. It is a waste of time and effort. As the government has made quite clear in the past, we are going to have to act, I think in the next Assembly-I have given up on this one-to work to lift the

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