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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1179 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I often comment on the fact that after these reports have been presented to the Assembly and the government has duly responded there has been a lack of action in implementing the responses to the reports. Particularly with reports I have been closely connected with, the government has agreed in principle to most of the recommendations. If Mr Humphries now wants to say that the recommendations were really stupid, what does that say about his government agreeing in principle to the recommendations? I take it that Mr Humphries is just having a bit of a rage about this particular report, the draft budget process and the Assembly's response to that.

We need to put clearly into this discussion the situation in which we were asked to look at the draft budget. I support Mr Quinlan's concerns about the amount of information that was given to the committee. I want to make it quite clear that this committee was not satisfied with the amount of information.

There is another point I would like to raise in response to Mr Humphries' angry and furious accusations. He said that a couple of the committee's recommendations were irrelevant because we do it anyway. I do not have the original documents here with me, but my recollection is that the government asked the committee to respond to the government's direction in certain ways. The committee has done that. The committee has said, "Do this. Do that." I thought that is what we were asked to do. We were saying to government, "We do not have a problem with this particular direction you are taking." But we are being abused for that now, it seems, because we are being told it is irrelevant. In fact, the government response says, "Irrelevant." It is a very angry response.

Mr Kaine: But you did not do the budget for him. That is the problem.

MS TUCKER: Mr Kaine interrupts to say that we did not do the budget for him. As I have already said, there was no way we had sufficient information on which to make any meaningful or detailed recommendations about how money should be spent. For me, it was a very interesting experience seeing how this government makes its decisions. The response from government was unnecessarily angry. We made a perfectly sensible recommendation in recommendation 24:

The committee recommends that the government report to the Assembly on how unmet need is currently assessed, and any proposals for developing and improving the methodology.

Implicit in that recommendation, I would have thought, is the acknowledgment that there needs to be some kind of improvement in, and development of, how you assess unmet need. That is implied in the recommendation. The government starts off in its response with a rather patronising statement:

The committee should note that assessment of need is an extremely imprecise and complex issue.

Yes, I think the committee knew that. It goes on to say that the committee did not understand the difference between need and want. The last sentence on this page of angry response reads:

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