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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (9 April) . . Page.. 804 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

I do not sense that there is any great compulsion about that argument. Only once before has the Assembly rejected an appropriation bill brought forward by a government. Ironically, there was a charge led by the treasurer himself, which resulted in that. This is not the kind of issue that might define a government's performance. To me, it seems very unlikely that the Assembly will choose to draw a line in the sand for the government to cross on this particular bill.

To cause this bill to be passed at this stage would have the effect that the Assembly-if indeed there is to be a fourth appropriation bill-would have to return to the process this financial year. It would be a question of a further estimates committee, a further series of calls for public submissions, a further series of public hearings, a further report, and further debate in this place. I do not think that would assist the parliamentary process. Rather than doing it in a piecemeal fashion, I think it would be better for us to use this time to absorb the full picture, with the use of subsequent appropriation.

We also have the possibility of using the Treasurer's Advance to deal with some of these matters. The Treasurer showed some aversion to the use of the Treasurer's Advance. He argued that there is more transparency by putting it forward in an appropriation bill. Indeed, that is true-there is more transparency. The Assembly needs to actually approve an appropriation, rather than simply noting that a TA has been used in the past.

It is worth reporting that many of the items referred to in this appropriation bill have already been incurred. The government has already begun to spend, or has already spent, many of these amounts of money. This is, in many ways, retrospective approval of either the beginning or completion of a process of spending money.

It also does not take full cognisance of amendments made, last year or early this year, to the financial management act. That act provides that there should be the laying on the table of a statement of what use has been made of the Treasurer's Advance when subsequent appropriation bills are produced in this place. The Assembly has a full picture of what is going on, whether it is by way of appropriation bill or Treasurer's Advance. As I have said, there is a down-side to a succession of appropriation bills.

The contents of the bill gave some members of the committee cause for concern. I note that when the bill was tabled, the Treasurer said, "We are tidying up the previous government's mess." In subsequent examination, the Treasurer indicated that most of the items in the bill were, in fact, mechanical. That is, they were matters which had arisen in the course of the financial year, many of which were not foreseeable.

The committee asked which items were foreseeable-that is, items which could have been dealt with by some previous process, such as the 2001-02 appropriation-and which were not. As with a number of other questions the committee asked, the answer to that question came too late for the committee to be able to profitably use it. It came just one working day before the committee was due to report. As such, the committee has not taken full cognisance of the content of it. I note that, in answering that question, the Treasurer was not able to categorically point to anything that had been foreseeable prior to the change of government, for example.

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