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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 6 Hansard (17 June) . . Page.. 1884 ..

MRS CROSS

(11.38): Mr Speaker, the estimates committee process has been a vigorous one this year, one that I believe has been dealt with in a conscientious way by all members of the committee. When I thought about how I would approach this process, I decided that my main goals would be to ensure that the government was held accountable for its budgeting decisions and abilities and also to give credit where it was due. I believe that the only minister to come before the committee who actually gave credit where it was due on both sides of the fence was Ms Gallagher, and I would like to commend her for that.

Allow me to deal with the latter first. The committee has recognised the efforts of the ministers in a range of ways. Minister Gallagher's willingness to set new targets that extend the old ones has been recognised in the report. Further, a series of positive initiatives have been implemented. For example, in disability services, where the government has responded to the Gallop report; in Health, where the bone bank has been funded, focus has been placed on detainees in the remand centre, and extra funding has been provided in the area of mental health; in Education, where junior school class sizes have been progressively reduced; with regard to bushfire victims, where the government has set aside significant funding for rebuilding; and in Justice and Community Safety, where a stronger mediation role for the Administrative Appeals Tribunal has been provided for and there has been a proposal for a gun buyback scheme.

There is no doubt that those few examples highlight that this budget carried a wide range of interesting and positive initiatives. The government itself, of course, has drawn attention to these positive initiatives. However, the committee was also charged with the important community responsibility of going through the budget with a fine toothcomb. I believe that my committee colleagues and I have taken this responsibility seriously.

Mr Speaker, budgets are not easy documents to read for those of us in this Assembly who are relatively inexperienced, but I must say that I am proud to be part of the group of people who took on this responsibility on behalf of the community in such an efficient and dedicated manner. That dedication revealed a range of issues about the way that this government is looking after the community's money and how it plans to use it over the next year.

Some of the things we discovered through this process were a little alarming. I decided to pursue the issue of empire building and was able to illustrate to other members of the committee, and now to this Assembly, that the government maintains poor control over the expansion of the senior levels of the public service. An expansion of 17 per cent is, indeed, something that should concern the community. It is now time to examine whether a parallel expansion has occurred across the public service as a whole. An expansion of the public service is something that might be acceptable if we could identify significant improvements in outcomes. Unfortunately, this was rarely the case.

One of the most alarming areas where there has been an increase in the SES but a reduction in the delivery of service is in the health portfolio. The increase in the SES in Health has occurred despite the loss of responsibility for disability services. When the committee probed the government about waiting lists for elective surgery, we discovered deterioration. When we probed about waiting times, we discovered deterioration. When

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