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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4312 ..

The next area the Auditor looked at was the tabling of audited financial statements. The Auditor-General found that there is no requirement for the financial statements of several entities that the government is responsible for to be tabled in the Legislative Assembly. The list of bodies included the ActewAGL joint venture, the Amaroo 3 joint venture, the Canberra Business Development Fund, CIT Solutions—and the list goes on. The Auditor felt that, given that there is a financial interest in all of these organisations, the Assembly should have this information provided to them.

The Auditor recommended that the annual reports of the territory entities be legally required to include the audited financial statements. The government disagreed with that, saying that the Australian accounting standards already have certain mandatory reporting requirements and that they are met. The committee in this case has sided with the Auditor-General and recommended that the audited financial statements of entities in which the territory has a controlling interest be legally required to be published in the relevant agency annual reports.

The next matter that the Auditor mentions that the committee has chosen to comment on are some inconsistencies in various departments. One is that ACTION may be in breach of its own act. We have recommended that the ACTION Authority Act be amended so that the ACTION authority’s objectives are consistent with its operations. This centres on the fact that the Auditor-General found that ACTION’s current assets are not sufficient to meet its current liabilities. As a result the Auditor-General recommended that the ACTION Authority Act be amended to remove the inconsistent legislative function requiring ACTION to seek to generate a profit. The government responded by saying that it is undertaking a review of the matter.

It is interesting that the committee commented on this issue in an inquiry the previous year. We have recommended this time that the ACTION Authority Act should be amended so that what ACTION does is consistent with its operations, or—I guess you could read conversely—if the government wishes to leave the act as it is, help ACTION to achieve what it is supposed to achieve under its act. The Auditor also looked at other areas—some of the departments and the Canberra Business Development Fund. I will not comment on all of those, but they are in the report.

One I will comment on is the Canberra Hospital. The Auditor found that the hospital did not manage its operations to budget, and also that a fair percentage of the capital works budget—$2.6 million of the $4.5 million allocated—had not been drawn down in the first six months of the financial year. It is interesting that the government did not provide comment about this in their submission. So the committee recommends that the government inform the Assembly of what it has done to address the failure of the Canberra Hospital to manage its operations to budget and the delays in the capital works spending. Other areas the Auditor commented on were the insurance authority, the Department of Justice and Community Safety, the Stadiums Authority and the superannuation unit. It is all there for members to read.

The issue of the superannuation unit has, again, been an ongoing quandary or argument between the Auditor-General and the Treasurer—and I think we are all well aware of the position of the Auditor. The Auditor-General has constantly advised that the accounting treatment adopted by the territory for the recognition of superannuation liability was not

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