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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2279 ..

very limited time with the Attorney-General because he had appointments in his diary for that day although he had been asked not to.

In addition, there were matters raised with Mr Stanhope in his capacity as Minister for Environment. When they were raised and he undertook to take some issues on notice, it was foreshadowed that the committee might recall him. Despite personal representations from the chairman of the committee to the Minister for Environment, that recall was never able to take place. The committee finds this unacceptable. Mr Speaker, it is simply not good enough that the most senior minister in this place holds the estimates process in contempt, because it is a matter of leading by example. If the Chief Minister, wearing one of his hats, thinks that it is not important to present himself for recall, that sends a message to his other ministers that perhaps they can get away with it and, quite frankly, that is not good enough.

One of the issues relating to the budget that I think we need to look at is the use of cash reserves. There are a number of projected capital works projects in the budget which will be paid for out of cash reserves. Speaking personally and not just from the views expressed by the committee at paragraphs 2.9 to 2.12, I think that it is important that we look very seriously at how we pay for capital works because they have a long life and there are problems with this generation paying cash for something which could be spread over the life of the whole capital work and be spread across a number of generations.

The budget papers themselves speak about funding capital expenditure by way of debt which is consistent with the principles of intergenerational equity. However, while the budget papers talk about it, when we are actually funding items of capital nature in the budget there is no provision for borrowing; it is all done from cash surpluses, which are nice to have but we should not be running them down too easily.

Mr Stefaniak has spoken about performance measures, which have become a recurring theme of the estimates committees of this Assembly and of previous assemblies. The performance measures in the budget are simply not good enough. The Treasurer was candid enough to say that they were crap. While we were encouraged to see that the chief executive of CMD has taken on the role of looking at performance measures, he has to be rigorous. Quite frankly, I do not want to have to see another recommendation like recommendation 7 in an estimates report, because recommendation 7 of this estimates report is very similar to recommendations in the previous two estimates committee reports. It is time for this government and any subsequent government to take notice of the fact that performance measures in budgets need to be meaningful and actually tell us something about the way the public service is performing and the way the government is performing. That is what they are there for. At the moment, they are meaningless.

There were issues in relation to projected revenue from the car parking levy. The car parking levy was touted and then put on the backburner because it was too difficult politically, but a year down the track from the first mooting of a car parking levy there is no idea exactly how this car parking levy would be implemented, how much it would cost per space, et cetera, and I think it is time that the government took the community into its confidence and actually spoke at some length about the car parking levy.

There are a number of other issues I would like to consider, mostly environment issues, because they have not yet been touched on. The committee has made a recommendation

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