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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 1 Hansard (13 December) . . Page.. 263 ..

Mr Quinlan: I reckon we will give them about as much information as you did last time, mate.

MR HUMPHRIES: You might not have liked what we put on the table last time, Mr Quinlan, but at least it was of more substance than this. As far as I can see-

Mr Quinlan: No it wasn't. It was a copy of the forward estimates.

MR HUMPHRIES: What is going to be put on the table here? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell. It is very hard to work out what we are going to get from this process. Committees are entitled to be involved in consultation but apparently on the basis of nothing.

I gather from this statement that committees will be able to meet and call for public submissions on what ought to be in the budget, but with a completely and utterly blank sheet in front of them, except for presumably the quarterly financial reports that are tabled for the existing year.

Mr Quinlan: Which is effectively where they were last year, is it not?

MR HUMPHRIES: No. There were proposals for government expenditure before the committees. There was ample information available to Assembly committees last year. As far as I can tell, there will be absolutely nothing before committees this year-not a thing, not a bean. There is no reference to any documentation or facts to be put before the committees. I would like to know how any committee is going to be able to make anything of that.

I do not mind the government having a mandate to replace the old system with something new, but I would like to see what the new system is. This statement gives us no enlightenment whatsoever on that subject. I am not surprised that it has been brought down on Thursday afternoon, not on Tuesday afternoon.

MS TUCKER (5.11): I will be interested to see exactly how consultation works. I would like to comment on what Mr Humphries has said. The consistent complaint we made during the so-called draft budget process under his government was that we were given what happened the year before and asked to invite community comment. Then we had many surprise announcements amounting to millions and millions of dollars after the fact.

I cannot see how Mr Humphries can claim to have had a process that was any better than what Mr Quinlan is proposing. The whole notion of a draft budget was challenged seriously through the processes that Mr Humphries trialled. I have said that we were happy to work with that. It seems when we asked the government to produce a much more detailed proposal so we could get a response from the community, it was not possible to do it.

It was not possible to get full information. Mr Humphries explained to the first committee looking at overall expenditure in the territory that there was not time to give the committee the fuller information that would be available closer to the time of the

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