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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (3 May) . . Page.. 1420 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

Since the government has a majority, we would normally vote against the budget, but that process went a little pear-shaped a year ago. Within a couple of days of that, we notified the government that we were happy to support the budget because we thought at that point that the original budget was being hijacked. We still contend that that was the case. We have all played politics with that situation since then and, every time an issue has come up, it is said that the opposition voted against it because for about three days it had withheld support for the budget.

I have to say that no commitment had been made in any way publicly by the government up to the point where the opposition did say that it would support the budget; nevertheless, agreements seemed to have been done and the budget was modified to satisfy a minority of the Assembly and, in fact, a provision that had been given majority support by this Assembly was removed from the budget. I think that that was an unfortunate episode. It does point up some of the difficulties we have in the ACT with minority government. You can say a lot of good in relation to the Hare-Clark system and it has dimensions to offer a unicameral parliamentary system in the territory. However, minority government does also carry with it some significant disadvantages. I do hope that in the course of this significant year some of those disadvantages can be pointed up.

In turning to Appropriation Bill (No 2), let me say that we still believe that it is more of a mini-budget than a supplementary appropriation. Many elements of it do fit neatly under the banner of supplementary appropriations. It does, however, also contain a little bit of mopping up of spare cash and what looks fairly much like some blatant manipulation of the final bottom line for this year. We have now seen what the government projected it to be on Tuesday, but we have seen the projection for even this year's bottom line all over the shop over the last few months.

In relation to the specifics, let me reiterate what I have said in relation to this supplementary appropriation. The fact is that the government is claiming to have brought down a draft budget and keeps using the term "draft budget" when all we saw was a steady stream of initiatives. That is where the term "piecemeal" came from, Mr Treasurer. We could see the pattern of this budget-the bottom line, the future bottom line and the piecemeal approach-even within the draft budget process. It was telegraphed fairly clearly, I think.

It was very disappointing to receive this document in the context of the government saying, "We have an elongated budget process. We are on top of this. We have a draft budget process," when all of the forward estimates contained in this supplementary budget paper remain the same as were contained in the budget brought down a year ago, despite the fact that there had been quite heroic press releases coming out to say that the government had looked at the bottom line and the bottom line had improved. As far back as, I think, December there was a claim that the bottom line was going to be $35.5 million at that point, just one of the many changes. The government did not see fit to inform this Assembly of that fairly essential context for this appropriation. Many of the items in this appropriation bill are one-offs, but not all of them. Several of them at least imply a commitment to recurrent funding, funding that would affect forward estimates, and you would have thought that the government would have included those.

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