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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (1 May) . . Page.. 1271 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

Mr Speaker, through you, I would like to relay to the Assembly a quite unique position that I found myself in. There are three members of the public accounts committee. One was absent. You and I, Mr Speaker, then reviewed the final draft of the report and we found several areas of disagreement. So this report is somewhat unique in that inasmuch as I present it, I also give notice that there is a dissenting report signed by me. This is the report, so I will try to do the body of the report justice before I move to the content of the dissenting report.

Mr Speaker, if I wander off the straight and narrow, you might want to correct me, or nod or frown at some stage. The committee did question the need for a second appropriation bill of this magnitude. You can see by looking at the bill that there are quite obvious inclusions, unforseen and urgent matters, that would naturally fit within a supplementary appropriation bill. But, then again, there also seem to be some items that could quite readily have waited until the budget was brought down today and could have been implemented during the course of the following financial year. Of course, we would have to question, as we went through the appropriation bill, whether it was possible to complete some of the work that was required by the particular line items within the appropriation bill.

After we heard the government claim to have put together a draft budget, we also were concerned that there was virtually no updating of the forward estimates. So we got an appropriation bill which had revised amounts and inclusions for this year, the current financial year, but the forward estimates incorporated into this bill were different, only one or two by a very marginal amount, from all of those forward estimates that were incorporated into the budget brought down a year ago. Even though there have been press releases from government updating the projected bottom line for this year, and many claims of a draft budget process, there was no change to the forward estimates contained within this particular bill.

In explanation, there was some discussion about that really just complying with the letter of the Financial Management Act. I personally remain to be convinced on that. I personally found it a little frustrating, trying to assess the consequences or the implications of some of the content of this appropriation bill, when no effort was made to provide information on down the line impacts. Quite obviously, some of the appropriations in this bill imply further expenditure in future periods. So we have a recommendation incorporated in the report saying that if the Financial Management Act does preclude the updating of forward estimates, then it should be so amended. I give notice that you can look forward to receiving that bill in this place under my hand.

We also discussed along the way, when talking about information as a sort of by-product, the fact that, according to the Financial Management Act, this Assembly receives monthly financial reports. I think I could state that virtually nobody in this place reads them, that nobody takes a lot of notice of them, and if they did they probably would be misguided by them because they do not include the normal balance day adjustments, clean up and accounting for timing differences that an end of accounting period would normally incorporate. Therefore, we have recommended that the Financial Management Act be amended so that we only get quarterly consolidated financial reports in this place. Again, I can give the Assembly notice that there will be legislation coming forward to enable that change to be made.

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