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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (13 June) . . Page.. 1645 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
is not the mission of this committee to say anything nice or approving about what the government has done with its budget.
Mr Speaker, this report is woeful. It is lamentable. It is a waste of the time of a large number of people involved in the exercise. I realise that others here will rise and say this is a wonderful report-that we have got wonderful things done in this document, it is terribly worthwhile, and it certainly should be supported entirely et cetera et cetera. I ask members of this place to use a test to determine how well this document actually achieves the purposes that the community would expect it to achieve. I ask members to go back and to read the report of the Select Committee on Estimates on Appropriation Bill 1994-95, the last Estimates Committee report brought down under the Labor government of the mid 1990s, and to examine not just the recommendations that are made in this report but the tone and direction of the report, and to compare it with the tone and direction which is exhibited in this report.
What I believe that will show is a vast difference in the constructiveness of these two documents. One is expressly a document designed to illuminate the budgetary process and assist in producing better budget outcomes for the territory. It is directed-and I believe it achieves that direction, incidentally-at the public interest. This document-the 2001-2002 budget report-is nothing other than, effectively, a long campaign speech written to achieve short-term political goals, and as such it has no useful benefit, no useful purpose, for people who may seek to understand what was going on in 2001 in the preparation of a better budget.
I want to just quote a few lines from page 10 of the report, and ask members to judge what they think about the document based on the language used here:
A careful analysis of the budget presents a picture suggestive of a confused and confusing process by which the Government has developed its budget. The majority of the committee sees evidence of random spending to soak up any operational/budget surplus.
. . .
On the evidence made available to the committee, the majority of it have been forced to conclude-
forced to conclude!-
that it is a budget designed for an election year with little to recommend it for the long term good management of the Territory's finances.
Mr Speaker, here we have a budget in surplus, a surplus projected to go out for several years in the future, long-term debt in terms of superannuation addressed, class sizes reduced, payroll tax burdens reduced, extra money for the hospital system, and they say it has "little to recommend it for the long term good management of the Territory's finances".
Mr Speaker, what conclusion does one draw from reading those words? I will quote another example: talking about the treatment of the superannuation liability. This is where in previous paragraphs there has been an attack on the way in which the
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