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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (11 April) . . Page.. 1053 ..
Appropriation Bill 2001-2002 (No 3)
Debate resumed from 19 February 2002, on motion by Mr Quinlan:That this bill be agreed to in principle.
MR HUMPHRIES (Leader of the Opposition) (5.33): Mr Deputy Speaker, I move:
That the debate be adjourned.
Question resolved in the negative.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Deputy Speaker, the opposition indicated in debate on the Select Committee on Estimates report on Tuesday that it would be supporting this bill, and it will do so very clearly in this debate today. I understand that there was some scuttlebutt which said that the motion to adjourn this debate was about allowing the opposition to oppose the bill. I am pleased to say that the ACT opposition has never opposed an appropriation bill in this place.
Mr Smyth: ACT Liberal opposition.
MR HUMPHRIES: The ACT Liberal opposition, a very important distinction to make, has never opposed an appropriation bill in this place.
Mr Quinlan: There goes half my speech.
MR HUMPHRIES: Sorry, Ted. As far as we are concerned, elected governments deserve the right, as a matter of course, to bring down their budgets and to amend their appropriations as appropriate. Whether they should do so without the possibility of amending the budget at some point is an issue that remains to be decided in this place. Perhaps the Assembly will see fit to amend appropriation bills in the future.
If my party seeks to oppose an appropriation bill, it will be on the basis that we wish to move what will effectively be a motion of no confidence in the government. Much as we might have wished for a different result from the election of October last year, we do not believe that bringing the government down is appropriate in these circumstances.
As I said the other day, the appropriation bill contains a series of items to supplement the budget that are for the most part entirely mechanical. They are items that are designed to deal with unforeseen cost pressures, which are inevitable in any given financial year. In this particular situation, a number of pressures might have been anticipated, but could not accurately have been dealt with earlier than at the time of the bringing down of the 2001-2002 budget.
Some items we might expect to come up almost as a matter of course. For example, the appropriation for the Director of Public Prosecutions covers expensive cases, which the DPP seems to incur every year, and which are in fact part of the base of the office of the DPP. Nonetheless, they need to be allowed for in appropriations such as this. Other items fall into that category as well.
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