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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 4 Hansard (11 April) . . Page.. 990 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

As I said, the Liberal government's draft budget process-and I tried to work with it-was not successful. That was not altogether the fault of the government although in part, of course, they obviously have to take responsibility. But I think it was a learning process to a degree as well, because one of the problems I saw was literally the amount of time that was available to have a very thorough draft budget process. We were not able to do it.

But there was another issue as well, which was the whole notion of having the draft budget and what it meant for our system of governance. I still have interesting questions for discussion. I realised during that process that to have any meaningful draft budget you basically had to have full access to financial information of the government of the day. I do not think any government would be particularly open to giving absolute full access to every piece of information about the financial state of every department. In other words, we would need to have the same degree of access to the chief executive officers of departments that the government does if we are seriously going to make decisions or have a view on exactly how all money should be spent.

If you follow that proposal then there is the potential of co-option, or the budget becoming the document of the whole Assembly and not the government. If the budget becomes the position of the whole Assembly, then obviously we will lose scrutiny, and there are concerns there. There is a potential for us to still have that full information, to come up with suggestions, and then take a position of opposition if we do not like what the government comes up with. So you could argue that it would still be the government's budget. But the process that would lead up to that is very time consuming and, as I said, would require a great deal of good faith from the government of the day.

I am open to different views on that. I do not have a totally closed mind on draft budgets. I know that some jurisdictions around the world have a participatory budget process which involves the community and the parliamentary assembly in that jurisdiction in real decision-making about how money is spent. I am still interested in the possibilities, but they are far from resolved in my mind. The processes in this Assembly have been an attempt to address this matter, but we certainly have not ended up with anything that we could all agree was workable.

As I understand it, what the Labor government is doing is saying that it is quite happy for committees to be involved in consultation with the community about the budget and what they want. That is what I saw this process doing. It wasn't useless. The people who had the opportunity and capacity to talk to committees did so. This was an interesting experience for all of us. In particular, the new members of the committee found it to be a good way to get across certain issues. One of the real merits of a committee system is that we learn through that process that we have an opportunity to hear the community.

The qualifications that I outlined in previous speeches here this morning are about how complete a picture we are getting. The fact that the document promised by the Treasurer was made available at a late stage is an issue of concern. I think there is an argument about how useful that document was anyway in terms of the consultation process and so on. So it will be interesting to hear Mr Quinlan's comments on that. Those are the comments I wanted to make on the whole budget process, and particularly on consultation and draft budgets.

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