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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1180 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The government is also addressing the issue of unmet need in its response to the Poverty Task Group Report.

Good. We knew that. We are glad that we had the poverty task force report, and we know it came up in that. We know it is an issue that is often brought up in the community. I do not know why the government has to be so angry about that.

We made two recommendations about waivers. Recommendation 21 reads:

The committee recommends that the Government review the way waivers and grants of land are currently managed, with a view to ensuring they appear on the face of the Territory's financial statements, through the operating statement.

Recommendation 22 reads:

The committee recommends that the Auditor General's views and advice be sought on an appropriate methodology for recording waivers and grants of land through the financial statements.

We recognise that there are some issues about how you do that, or we would not have made the second recommendation. Maybe the people who were responding to this for the minister responded as each recommendation came up, without reading the next one. The response to recommendation 21 is:

Not agreed.

The committee appears to be unaware that section 65 of the Financial Management Act requires that waivers be disclosed as notes through the financial statement. This is to ensure that these transactions, which in no way give rise to any financial transaction, are disclosed.

The words "give rise to any financial transaction" seem to be their key point. Because it is not a financial transaction, it is not to be included in the financial statements. Maybe that is true-I do not know. The committee also asked that the Auditor-General's views on whether or not that could happen be taken into account.

The critical thing behind both these recommendations is that the committee wants to know how much forgone revenue there is. This committee was asked to look at expenditure and revenue. We had very limited time as well as limited information. Given that limited time, we had to ask ourselves how we could look at revenue if we could not see how much revenue this government was forgoing. That is the point of these recommendations. The government says:

In the case of grants of land, there is no requirement to recognise these through the financial statements. Details of grants of land are regularly tabled in the Assembly along with an indication of what the market value for the land would have been. The value included in the instrument disclosing the grant of land does not reflect any valuation that has been accounted for by the Territory.

In nearly all instances where land is granted the land is valued at the lower cost and not realisable value in accordance with AAS 2 Inventories. As most of the land held by the Territory was given to it by the Commonwealth the value of this land is nil,

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