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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2285 ..

For those caught up in the credit card mentality, the temptation is to go for ever larger projects. For example, one of the things that came out of the committee was getting a move on with the Supreme Court and some of the other larger things. You can get a move on them all right if you stick them on a credit card. Buying a Supreme Court on a Mastercard would be a good one. Whilst you have a building as an asset, you probably could; but you would have to take that into consideration in the context of everything else that you had borrowed and make sure that have sufficient money coming through your revenue streams to repay that debt. I do not have the confidence that those opposite have that fiscal control, but time will tell.

Some comments were made by my colleagues about performance measures. Some members of the gallery will recall that over successive budgets in this place, for years and years, I had a bit to do with trying to bamboozle members of this place, and I was quite successful in my time, too. That was because I gave performance measures which were absolutely meaningless. Mr Speaker, we are talking here about exhorting the government of the day to have meaningful effectiveness measures. The committee talked about that. It is really important that we have effectiveness measures. I would rather see an effectiveness measure than an efficiency one, but a combination of the two would be even better.

If you are talking about the performance measures of a doctor’s surgery, it is a fat lot of good having a really efficient doctor’s surgery in which patients are going through at a rate of knots if they all die when they get out the door. You want to know whether the doctor is actually curing people, lessening their disability, or whatever. So you need to know how effective that particular visit is in that regard. I would exhort agencies to look at the effectiveness measures and test them.

With that need to go qualitative measures as well as quantitative ones. All too often quantitative measures are nothing short of a workload indicator. I do not need convincing that members of our public service work their backsides off, that they work really hard and set a fine example to the Commonwealth public service. But we do not need to be told that in the budget papers or the annual reports. We need to know whether they are effective; that is what we really need to know. I think that was lacking a bit in these budget papers. Members picked that up and describe it in various ways.

I would like to make the point that an examination of the Hansard will reveal that there were 92 sitting hours, or thereabouts, but essentially the critique of the budget was taken up by members of the committee. Most members had little marks in their books, but the visits that we received from shadow ministers, with notable exception, I have to say, were pretty ordinary. The actual amount of work done by the shadow ministry was pretty ordinary. In fact, I might go so far as to say that they did not lay a glove on any of the ministers, let alone bring a tear to their eye. Mr Speaker, I do hope that they have learnt a lesson out of this and that in their next term in opposition they will build on it, be a little bit more forensic and do a little bit more hard work.

Mrs Burke: Just like you did.

MR HARGREAVES: I remind that serial interjector across the corridor, that lady who cannot hold her tongue—Mrs Burke, do you have that tongue registered with the

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