Page 2189 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 August 2006
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this house and I do not believe that my recommendations could have been different to the ones that I made.
I thank the committee for their tolerance in allowing the inclusion of some paragraphs and some recommendations that only a Green would put forward. I am talking here about triple bottom line accounting and probably more scrutiny of issues related to the environment and sustainability and to social justice and housing than I heard other committees members raise. I will pay them the respect of saying that perhaps it was just that I raised them first and they had every intention of putting them.
I chose to be involved because the estimates process is so important. I think the budget is the heart—or should I say “guts”, because we have had that word mentioned a few times today—of government. Volumes of words are spoken in this house and in other committee meetings but this is where words have to be turned into numbers and where we see, we hope, what government actually intends to do over the next financial year.
The importance of this process has to be the only explanation that I can come up with for the extraordinary shenanigans that we saw last Friday and the weekend. I have to say that I guess I went into shock when this started. I have respect for government as an institution, and I went into the estimates process with an understanding of the numbers on the committee. You do not have to have a political science doctorate to know that governments and all political players like to advantage themselves. I was prepared for that but I was absolutely unprepared for the kind of thing that we saw happening on Friday.
Let me just go through what happened. On Friday morning we had a meeting, which was meant to be our last deliberative meeting, at which the committee was expected to adopt the report. As you are well aware, Ms MacDonald was absent. There are various theories relating to that but it is really only the Labor Party that can answer those questions. We went through each of the recommendations and affirmed them, threw them out or neatened them up. So there was a real sense of ownership of that part of the report.
Not everyone agreed. Mr Gentleman voted against a number of the recommendations, and I am sure you will see that recorded in his additional remarks. However, in view of everything that we had put in the report, there is no way that I could have agreed to the final recommendation in the report that the Appropriation Bill be recommended to the Assembly for passing, or words to that effect. To do so would have been absolutely inconsistent with everything that I have said about this budget and everything I have learned about this budget, which is not nearly as much as one would expect to learn from an estimates committee process. All kinds of things can be said. This is my opinion and I will hold to it.
Our failure to agree to that proposal—it is not unusual for an estimates committee not to make a recommendation that an appropriation bill be passed—was quite disturbing to the government members. I think they are more sanguine about it now but at that time I think it was very upsetting. We decided to have another meeting that afternoon and that I would come up with a form of words and talk to the government members beforehand. I did come up with a form of words and I talked to the opposition members and the government members beforehand. Most of us turned up to the meeting but two did not. So it was not a meeting. It was not quorate and that meeting was never officially opened.
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