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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2276 ..

MS DUNDAS

To move on: the Chief Minister's Department also manages the grant to a professional AFL team, the North Melbourne Kangaroos. A substantial grant is given to an interstate team to play AFL in Canberra. It is much larger than the grants that we give to grassroots AFL teams, to teams that actually play in the ACT. There is a worrying trend with that. It indicates that the government may not be serious about improving the health and wellbeing of the ACT community on the ground, maybe just the entertainment aspects. To me, that is evidence of skewed priorities.

I am quite appalled at the decision to spend an extra $250,000 on government spin doctors, which has already been discussed in this Assembly. It is a substantial amount of money that could have been spent on improving service delivery in any one of many areas of need. While it is important that the government and members of the Assembly communicate with the people who live in the ACT, how much money is really needed to be spend on doing that and will a whole-of-government media department actually achieve better outcomes in communication or better outcomes for the people of the ACT? I will discuss that further when I move on to discussing the Liberals' amendment to the budget.

More generally, I am concerned at the ongoing rollovers from year to year within the Chief Minister's Department's budget line. It seems that a number of these deferred projects simply disappear after spending has been delayed for a few years. We can actually see in this budget for the Chief Minister's Department the removal of 2001-02 rollovers of close to $4 million. Projects that were appropriated for in the 2001-02 budget-I note that that was the former government's budget and not this government's budget-were never completed and the money has just disappeared back into the bottom line.

In the 2002-03 budget there was a substantial number of rollovers across the ACT public service, across the departments, but specifically there were quite a few in the Chief Minister's Department. I find this practice quite concerning. We get information about what the government is planning on doing in the year and we give the government money to implement those schemes yet, for whatever reason, these projects are not finished, they are continually deferred, and what the community expects from this government or any other government does not actually take place. Eventually, as evidenced by this budget, the projects and the money just disappear.

Specifically, in this year's budget we have knowledge funds being continually rolled over. I do wonder whether they will eventually be expended and the knowledge fund project continued or they will just vanish. I am also concerned that some of the economic white paper funding is disappearing.

I have previously expressed concerns that too little targeted consultation was done as part of the development of the white paper process to elicit views from the wider community about how the ACT should develop its economy. As a result, I fear that the final paper will be narrowly focused on the interests and needs of existing ACT businesses, instead of leading to an economic plan that delivers equity by improving employment opportunities for the people who are now unemployed.

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