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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4311 ..

recommendations. The first recommendation addresses the underspend in capital works. The Auditor notes that the under-expenditure in the 2002-03 year was $58 million, or 37 per cent less than allocated. The figure of $58 million is the same amount that was under-expended in the capital works in 2001-02. When we get the capital works report some time today, it will be interesting to see if the trend has continued.

The Auditor commented on the trend. The committee was concerned that there seemed to be a trend of not completing capital works. Where the under-expenditures occurred in important areas like health, justice and education we had some concerns. We have recommended that the government inform the Assembly of what it has done to address the trend of underspending of capital works funding, just so we get a handle on what is happening in this very important area. It is important to the construction industry in terms of job flows and making sure we have an adequate work force. It is also much more important to the people of the ACT when you look at the list of projects that were delayed in that year. We will be interested in making sure that the government gets it right in the coming years.

The next area of interest was the territory’s model of financial administration. In relation to that, the Auditor found that the territory’s conceptual model for financial management has not been critically reviewed since it was put in place in 1996. The government has had an ongoing review of issues as they emerge. The Auditor-General was not in favour of the incremental review as he thought it might lead to missing certain issues—or a lack of continuity across the act. The committee agrees with the Auditor-General in that and, in recommendation 2, calls on the government to evaluate the territory’s model of financial management, to make sure that our financial management is in the best interests of the people of the ACT.

The Auditor then talks of territory compliance with the Financial Management Act and points out some examples where he believes the FMA has not been complied with. To their credit, this was also included in the Auditor-General’s Report No 7 of 2002 and in the Auditor-General’s report of 2001. The government has confirmed that it will be taking corrective action on this issue. That of course will put this in the purview of the public accounts committee in the next Assembly and I am sure they will keep a similar watching brief on it.

The next area is one that has dogged probably every Assembly, every committee and every report ever put out in this place. With regard to the output performance measures, the Auditor-General found that there had been a significant reduction in the number of performance measures reported by agencies, which he thought was a positive development. He said, “However, scope exists to further reduce the number of reported measures without sacrificing the information needs of the Legislative Assembly and the community.”

Again, this has been raised in a number of reports over time and the committee felt it was now appropriate that the government undertake a comprehensive review of these through consultation with the members of the Assembly, as well as the ACT community, so that we get an intelligent feel for what would be useful and what makes mistakes. There are a number of reporting indicators or performance measures in the budget where the measure is: “(1) provide advice”. So, “We have provided 100 per cent of advice; therefore we have complied.” I think it is important that we get them correct as well.

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