Page 2186 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 August 2006
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committee? Who revealed them to him? These are unfortunate incidents and questions have to be answered. We need to be given an answer to the serious question: how did Mr Stanhope and Mr Friedewald know what was going on inside the committee.
Mr Deputy Speaker, key on the list of problems that the committee had was the behaviour of ministers, and Mr Hargreaves is singled out for his appalling behaviour in the committee. Mr Hargreaves is singled out because of his obfuscation, his inability to answer, and indeed, in many cases, his simple refusal to answer. Mr Hargreaves expects us to vote him a budget of many hundreds of millions of dollars. I assume that he wants us to do so on trust. Mr Corbell has just joined this debate, and that is a good thing. Mr Corbell told us exactly how many staff would be lost from his department. He told us what areas they would be coming from. He even told us what jobs would be lost inside those areas, and that is exactly how it should be.
If you have put your budget together, you should have a reasonably close idea about what is going. After we got over the initial confusion of what is happening in the health budget, Ms Gallagher was able to do the same. As I recall the numbers, there are to be 136 off to shared services, seven in from Healthpact, 91 new initiatives, and 32 are to be lost. The accounting that she gave did not match the numbers in the budget papers but, when asked, Ms Gallagher could give us a good breakdown, a reasonably accurate breakdown, of what jobs would be lost. This was not the case with the Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, the Minister for Education and Training or the Chief Minister. The excuse was: “Well, we have not taken over those bits of the department yet. We do not know; we have not been briefed.” Well, you put the budget together. You signed off on it. You want the money appropriated to you but you do not know what you are doing. On the basis of that you should not get the money. If you cannot justify what you are going to use it for and what you are going to spend it on, you should not get the money.
The committee has concerns about the failure to answer questions adequately. The Chief Minister has a special little answer to the question “where has the money gone?” He says, “We have to make up for all your mistakes. The money went on ESA and mental health and the Gallop report and other things.” So I put a question on notice to the minister to detail what the cost was of the things that he had rattled off in his litany and how many jobs were involved. He could not tell me. He said, “Ask the other ministers; I am not responsible.” Well, the Chief Minister is responsible for the entire budget. He has an obligation to answer the question and he just simply refused to do so.
Mr Hargreaves again scored very poorly in respect of language and insults. It is a severe embarrassment to him. If members want to search the Hansard they will see that the language is appalling. It certainly would not be used in here. You would not allow it to be used here, Mr Deputy Speaker, and it should not be used.
The nub of the committee’s concerns came down to the functional review. This is an interesting issue. We have a review of several hundred pages carried out by Mr Costello that tells us why they are doing everything they are doing in the budget. But they cannot tell us why, and that is the nub of the problem. That is why this committee report does not recommend that the budget be passed. We do not know why they have done this. The rationale has been denied to us, and they are hiding behind the claim of cabinet-in-confidence. Mr Stanhope, when in opposition, said he would not hide behind cabinet-in-
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