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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 2070 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

Let us imagine Mick Lilley and Kate Carnell sitting down in 1997 to knock up the first set of accrual accounting for 1996-97, finding a loss of $170 million or $150 million and saying, "Gee, this doesn't look good. Previously, we have been talking about breaking even and deficits of $40 million. What do we do? We had better have a look backwards and see how bad it used to be, cough, cough." Of course, having come up the next year with a figure of $100 million, you could not sustain it. It went back to $148 million and then $131 million. It turned around only when government funding turned around, but still you use it.

Mr Humphries: So, it did turn around; $173 million worth of turnaround?

MR QUINLAN: I do not think so.

Mr Humphries: The auditors think so.

MR QUINLAN: There was an extraordinary item of $91 million. Anyway, I repeat for your benefit, the Auditor-General never said 1995-96 was a year of Labor government. It was a year of Liberal government.

MR SPEAKER: Order! The member's time has expired. Do you wish to take an extra 10 minutes, Mr Quinlan?

MR QUINLAN: Yes, Mr Speaker. I have asked for the file. I think it will be interesting reading. The Auditor has actually said to me, "The best thing you can do is add that year and the next year and divide by two and you will probably have a rough idea of the two years." That was an informal comment, but that is certainly what he has said. You would expect that. You just do not get those sorts of violent fluctuations year to year without there being something wrong with the accounts. But the government is still going to make that claim.

At this point, I have to register a little disappointment with our print media. I have had this discussion with senior people at the Canberra Times. Grudging recognition that the government has overstated the case was incorporated in one editorial, surrounded mainly by favourable comment. It is a little disappointing for a city like Canberra that this fiction is being repeated and repeated and the newspaper has not taken the government to task just once and said, "Right, let's speak the truth. Let's say how bad it was, but let's not overstate it by probably double the depth of the problem that we had." That is a bit sad, actually.

Anyway, to the budget itself, I have to say that, for a different reason, I have to agree with the academic who attended the budget breakfast at which Mr Humphries and I spoke and called it a budget of missed opportunities in that money could have been applied with more stimulating effect economically. Really, it is a budget of missed opportunities, as was the one last year, because this government politically should be out there in a better position than it is as a function of it. Instead of taking that approach, you have stuck with the Carnell-inherited PR approach, the marketing approach, which spawned last year a whole lot of pap titles. It has also spawned 20 or 30 pages of separate so-called initiatives, initiatives that are quite often, it turns out, just added expenditure for someone else. We went through one at estimates and found out that some section somewhere got an extra clerk and that turned out to be an initiative.

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