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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (11 April) . . Page.. 1056 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
I might remind members that one of those areas was the hospital. We were told that the hospital urgently required funding in order for it to be able to operate beyond Christmas. We were told that there would be a crisis in the hospital by Christmas if funding was not provided. We received an answer, courtesy of the Treasurer, in the last sitting period, to the question about exactly how the money appropriated in the second appropriation bill was to be used to assist the hospital.
The answer demonstrated that there were a number of components of that extra money for the hospital that were clearly not a matter of urgency, or which had not yet been the subject of drawing down by the hospital. In this Estimates Committee, Mr Smyth asked the health minister about the nature of the request that the department of health or the hospital made for this extra funding. Members of that committee will be aware that no answer was provided to that question.
Again, this question of why the appropriation is urgent remains unanswered. Today, we are again being asked to pass legislation through this place without being provided with a full set of answers to questions, and without a full explanation of the urgency of the matter.
The Treasurer did make this point in the course of the hearings of the Estimates Committee: he said that he believed that the Assembly needed to pass the appropriation bill relatively promptly, because he wanted to know whether the Assembly would approve the appropriations at all. Presumably, if the Assembly rejected the appropriations, it would be possible for the government to restructure its program, knowing that it did not have the money to spend on these extra items.
As I have said, first of all that argument is nonsense, given the often stated position of my party that it does not block appropriation bills. The government knew that, with its own votes and those of the opposition, it could not possibly lose its own appropriation bills. The result of passing the bill in this time frame-and presumably the same thing will apply to a fourth appropriation that is moved later this year-is that, because the Treasurer chooses not to spend the money until he has the appropriation for it, the chance of having full scrutiny by an estimates committee and of having proper consideration of the government's responses to recommendations, is limited.
The recommendations were brought down on Tuesday of this week. The government responded to them, as I have said, in a very cursory and desultory way on Thursday, today, and the Assembly is now expected to pass this bill in the next hour or so. I think that is a process which is unfortunate and unsatisfactory.
I have also predicted, and I do so again, that there will be a fourth appropriation for this financial year and, when that happens, again there will have to be consideration of whether an estimates committee is appropriate.
Mr Quinlan: What don't I know?
MR HUMPHRIES
: What you do not know apparently, Mr Quinlan is that budgets inevitably face difficulties as the year goes on. With the best will in the world, the people you appoint to manage budgets throughout the government's administration cannot
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