Page 2387 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 June 2005
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Just for the record, last year the government released as part of its formal budget papers a supplementary paper entitled Framework for future Budget presentations—discussion paper. The paper noted the government’s commitment to sustainability and its intent to “embed sustainability principles into government practice”. The paper stated:
It is therefore important that Budget Papers reflect sustainability principles, facilitate an understanding of the resource allocation decisions and the underlying objectives, and provide a framework of measures and targets against which progress could be measured both on an annual basis and on the longer time horizon.
Also, the paper stated that the purpose was to:
initiate a discussion and consultation process that would assist in the development of a framework to be incorporated into future Budget Papers that is relevant to the needs of the community and the key stakeholders.
It is important to remember these original intentions. I would be concerned if the focus went back to, or was limited to, “performance measures”. This is not an appropriate term to describe the incorporation of sustainability factors into the budget process.
Performance measures historically have simply been economic indicators of financial accountability. The discussion paper from last year’s budget used the term “triple bottom line”—but importantly interchangeably with “sustainability”—and noted that the intent is to broaden the scope beyond financial accountability to include social and environmental considerations. As the May 2004 supplementary budget paper also stated, it involves a “multidimensional and holistic view of human activities and their impacts”.
Importantly, also, the paper last year highlighted four principles that could underpin incorporating sustainability into the budget process. They were: broader scope and focus, transparency, accountability and integrated planning and operations. I draw attention to these just as a reminder of where we started on this process and to hopefully to keep us on track. Through the estimates process we received a range of feedback on these new indicators, both at a very specific level and more broadly, and I hope that this will all be taken into account in the future.
The particular point was made in the estimates report that the onus is on government now to embark on a broad and deliberate consultation on the incorporation of sustainability principles into the budget. This is a complex issue but there is a deal of expertise in the Canberra community that could be harnessed with the right approach.
Mr Speaker, the Treasurer constantly bemoans the fact that he received very little feedback to the paper that I have just quoted at some length. I would like the Treasurer to see the estimates process as part of the feedback. We are talking about difficult concepts here that a lot of people, including, I think, a number of ministers, have not really got their heads around. It was fairly clear that a lot of the performance indicators used in the budget vary from department to department. There is no consistency. There is no way that we, as budget readers, could have made judgments about the way the indicators were used for different departments.
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