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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 2 Hansard (6 March) . . Page.. 604 ..

MR SMYTH (continuing):

The committee is surprised that no exercise seems to have been undertaken to identify areas where expenditure might have been deferred or existing programs delayed or reduced in scope.

If this government had any idea of how to manage its finances, it would already have informed the Assembly how the $17.3 million is to be funded. Will the government be drawing down its cash reserves? Will it be from additional borrowings? Will there be a new tax and, if so, on whom and how much? These questions should already have been explained by the government if it had any idea of what it was doing.

To make matters worse, the government is not interested in putting in place any performance measures, so how will we know if the purposes of spending the $17.3 million have been achieved? We can have no confidence in this government.

But the money does need to be spent, and an important part of the recovery process is to ensure that the activities of the government-both the ongoing activities and those directly related to recovery from the bushfires-are able to continue and be properly funded. That is the purpose of this bill.

The opposition supports the bill as an effective first response to funding all the activities associated with the bushfires-to the extent that we can estimate some costs at this point. Members will recall that the Public Accounts Committee conducted an inquiry into this bill and that the outcome of the inquiry was that we recommended that the bill be passed. I thank the minister for his quick response to the bill.

I am pleased that recommendation 2 has been accepted. I understand the difficulties that there will be in pulling together the various elements that try and give us a bottom line cost on the fires, and we look forward to the government's efforts to make that occur.

The government might have missed the point in its response to recommendation 3. It is about the day-to-day risk management, as well as disaster risk management, inside the various departments. Under the Insurance Authority Act, the Insurance Authority is charged with providing advice on risk management to the departments. I would urge the departments to take up that advice, as the authority is very capable of providing it.

The opposition has no particular issue with the estimates of the expenditure that are included in the bill, although we will be keeping a watching brief on all the expenditure and related matters from this point. We will also be considering very carefully the responses the PAC has received to date, and is yet to receive, to the questions that have been asked of departments and agencies. If there is a requirement to delve further into any matters, we will certainly do that.

We must acknowledge as well that, while this bill seeks to appropriate more than $17 million to pay for various of the costs incurred in responding to the disaster, there will be recoveries of costs from other sources. These two flows of funds need to be considered together.

It is still relatively early days in determining the extent of recoveries from such sources as the federal government's natural disaster relief arrangements and the insurance

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