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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Thursday, 26 August 2004) . . Page.. 4313 ..

in accordance with the requirement of Australian Accounting Standard 29. The government has said it will look at this. I think the Treasurer has recently taken it on board, so we will leave that one where it stands.

To summarise, the report looked at what was in the Auditor-General’s report and we acknowledge the views he has presented. He has made certain suggestions to which the committee has agreed. In our recommendation 7 we suggest that the Assembly take note “particularly in relation to: agencies non-management of financial operations to budget and incursion of loss, and non-compliance with the Financial Management Act 1996” as important issues.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the members of the committee, which comprised Ms Tucker, Ms MacDonald and me. It is quite interesting that, with all three of us being committee chairs, we all had competing interests for our time. All the same, we worked well together to achieve what we have achieved over the past three years. The committee was well supported by the secretariat, as always. We have had two significant secretaries to the committee during that time and I thank them both. There were a number of stand-in secretaries, and I thank them for their assistance in transition periods.

Stephanie Mikac, who is the current secretary, has served very well and grown into the job. I congratulate Stephanie on all the effort she has put in to making the committee look professional and get the reports out on time. On behalf of all committee members, I thank her for the way she has helped us in our endeavours and looked after the interests of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts for the Fifth Assembly.

Ms MacDONALD (12.12): I want to refer to a couple of issues in this report. The first one is the recommendation that, “The government critically evaluate the Territory’s model of financial management including the conceptual basis for these arrangements.” In the report we have talked about the Auditor-General saying that, “The Territory’s conceptual model for financial management has not been critically reviewed since its introduction in 1996”, and that, subsequently, “The Auditor-General recommended the evaluation of the Territory’s conceptual model for financial management.” We also say:

The government has noted the Auditor-General’s recommendation and stated that the Territory continually monitors developments in other jurisdictions with improvements to financial models. As there are no identified major problems with the operation of the Territory’s current financial model, the present incremental approach to change is considered less risky and less costly than a larger scale approach to review.

We go on to say:

The Auditor-General was not in favour of the incremental review as such an approach would make it … unlikely that major issues will be identified or addressed on a timely basis unless either a significant problem arises or a critical evaluation of the model is performed.

I raised that issue in a committee meeting. I have to say I was not successful in arguing the case on this. I point out that the Auditor-General did not find any faults that had occurred to the model up to that moment but was predicting that a problem may arise and

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