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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (11 April) . . Page.. 1054 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

The government has characterised this bill as clearing up some kind of financial mess. I simply adopt the comments that I made the other day on this subject, which indicated that to characterise it in that way is foolish, because there will be second or third appropriations, I suspect, in every year from now on, in this place. While we have this system of appropriating for the operations of government, there will always be second and third appropriations, or at least second appropriations. To characterise those, ipso facto, as being the result of some mismanagement of the framing of the original budget is very foolish indeed, but that statement has been made and Mr Quinlan will have to live with it.

Today we have received the response by the government to the Select Committee on Estimates report. That response is, as one might expect, a fairly brief document. The response was put together in light of the knowledge that there was some resistance to the passage of this bill while the recommendations of the select committee had not been addressed. As a result, this report purports-and I emphasise "purports"-to respond to the recommendations of the select committee.

Mr Deputy Speaker, one can read in the words of this report the extreme testiness of the Treasurer about the recommendations that the select committee has made. The government rarely sees fit to indicate directly whether it supports or does not support a particular recommendation. Indeed, it is impossible to decipher whether some of the replies provided to the committee's recommendations support or oppose those recommendations.

The Treasurer and the Chief Minister smirk at that comment. Perhaps they think that doing that is very cunning.

Mr Stanhope: We were not listening.

MR HUMPHRIES: I think that it is an unfortunate response to a committee. I think this committee deserves to have its recommendations taken seriously.

It is also true, as the Treasurer notes in his presentation speech to go with this response, that the report does not deal strictly with issues solely within the bill itself. That is perfectly true, but what is interesting about that is that Mr Quinlan, the Treasurer, bridles at a state of affairs that persisted throughout the time that he has served in this place, and before it, when estimates committees on which he served, and those before that time, regularly, in fact almost inevitably, reported on matters touching on any aspect of the budget whatsoever. I complained about that at the time, as Treasurer, but I accepted it, and I think Mr Quinlan will have to learn to do the same thing.

I come back to the response that has been tabled today. It is a contemptuous response to what the committee has done. In some cases, it simply fails to take up in a fulsome way the issues that have been raised. The committee, for example, recommended that the recycling education campaign should be extended, by time and scope, to ensure that the ACT's effort on recycling is not allowed to fall backwards. The government is responding by simply describing its existing education program, and giving no indication whatsoever of whether it intends to accept the recommendation for an extension.

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