Page 1137 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 May 2006
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Mr Stanhope: Are you speaking from experience, Mrs Dunne?
MRS DUNNE: Yes, I am speaking from experience. I have participated in a minor way with the drafting of budgets. I have seen how they have been put together, and I know how you can write a budget to hide things or reveal things. It is not all sort of smoke and mirrors. A lot was said about the code of good government in his speech on 14 March 2001. I like this one:
There will be no Full Monty Budgets—
I remember that one—
no Drover’s Dog Budgets, no Three Bags Full Budgets under Labor. Our commitment to our core values will ensure we do not neglect the big picture items like the Territory’s unfunded superannuation liability.
But the trouble is that in this place, and in this town at this time, no-one knows what this government are neglecting in terms of big picture items, because they will not tell the community what the issues are.
Mr Costello is a highly-paid official, and the expenditure that has gone on in the preparation of this document is, as Mrs Burke said, not Mr Stanhope’s money; it is the money that the taxpayers of the ACT pay for the good governance of this place—and, because they pay, they have a right to see. There may be some parts of those documents that will not or could not be revealed in full, but really this government should be taking the community into its confidence. Its failure to take its community into its confidence shows that the person who leads this government, the person who has taken on the mantle of Treasury, is a man who is not as good as his word. What he said on 14 March 2001 does not hold true today and what he says today will not hold true in the future. This is a man who cannot be trusted and you cannot trust a government that will not come clean with the community.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella—Minister for the Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Housing and Minister for Multicultural Affairs) (4.14): I would like to address a couple of things that have been said today. The accent has been essentially, if I can read it properly, on consultation with the community over this functional review. There are, according to those opposite as I read it, two problems with the functional review. One is that the community have not been involved and consulted prior to its being done and the second is that they have not got a clue what is in it. That is code for “the community doesn’t know”, and “the community doesn’t know” is code for “we don’t know what’s in it.” Well, hard luck; you are not going to know what is in it.
Mrs Burke said that Mr Stanhope has not ever said that it is cabinet-in-confidence or it is linked to the budget. In fact, Mr Stanhope has been repeatedly advising that this document is in fact a cabinet-in-confidence document.
Mrs Burke: From when, John; since when?
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