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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (28 August) . . Page.. 3354 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Since I am the principal disputer of the 1995-96 year, I expect the terms of reference for independent audit to be established according to my requirements. Already you have publicly acknowledged cost as an issue for such an audit. I wish to contain the costs of the audit by confining it to the areas that concern me.

He is happy to have an audit of the $344 million inherited operating loss from Labor done independently, but not, apparently, to the full extent and width of that full question. He only wants the audit to concern itself with issues "by confining it to the areas that concern me".

Mr Speaker, would I be right in suspecting that perhaps the issue which has been raised so many times in this place-was there an operating loss of $344 million in 1995-96?-is not one of the issues that Mr Quinlan actually finds of concern to him at this point? Obviously, he will look at the documents for that year, but not necessarily all of them. Of course, we have had the Auditor-General give an audited statement for that year indicating that in his opinion the operating loss was, indeed, $344 million.

Imagine if a public company wanted its books audited and company officials said, "We do not want you to look at all of our books. Only some of the books are okay to look at, but not all of them." People would be a tad suspicious. Indeed, that is the case here. Mr Quinlan is trying to pull a swiftie in this matter. He wants to get away without having the full matter scrutinised.

Mr Quinlan: I take a point of order, Mr Speaker. Is that parliamentary?

MR SPEAKER: I am just about to check on that.

MR HUMPHRIES: I will keep going while it is being looked up. We have here an attempt to look as though the issue is being addressed without really getting to the nub of the issue. It seems to me that there is only one issue that an independent auditor needs to consider: did the territory make a loss of $344 million in that year? It is pretty simple and I think that an independent auditor would, quite rightly, come to a view about that based on the information which Mr Quinlan now has in his office.

We talk about the $344 million operating loss as if it is an issue in the distant past. Of course, it is not. The issue of what our likely operating losses are going to be in the future are very real if we find ourselves spending beyond our means. I note in this respect that in the undeclared election campaign to date the Labor Party has made commitments totalling over $16 million in recurrent costs and capital costs of $6 million, and the campaign is barely under way.

I will detail those: over $1 million for extra officers and staff for this Assembly and for these MLAs; $5 million in commitments in corrections; $3 million in commitments in the environment; and $7 million at least to restore the former victims of crime compensation scheme. The campaign has not even started yet and we are already finding that Jon's white whale has surfaced.

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