Page 2192 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 August 2006
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under Mr Stanhope’s stewardship. This is a budget that no committee in its right mind would find acceptable to pass, yet all three Labor members voted to pass it.
Getting to the detail of the report, Labor members of the estimates committee voted against numerous recommendations which were put forward by myself and my colleague Mr Smyth for inclusion in the report. Sensible recommendations put forward by Dr Foskey were thrown down the can.
Many of the recommendations made perfect sense in the context of this year’s budget and in light of the scrutiny that took place, but the Labor members obviously have been given orders to protect their Chief Minister in his new role as Treasurer. That is why we have come up with this dissenting report.
I would like to discuss some of the recommendations and issues coming out of the budget estimates scrutiny process that I think are significant. The committee’s report may have touched on these but did not express strong concern or include tough enough recommendations on those issues. I will focus on a couple.
Police: one of the key areas of concern that I have coming out of the estimates process is the failure of this government to have released both the policing agreement and the ACT police joint study prior to the estimates hearings. While I understand that the government did not want to release either of these documents until after cabinet deliberations and until after the budget was announced, there seems to be no reason why they could not subsequently have released the joint study and the police agreement to allow the estimates committee to take both of those into account when scrutinising the government over their budget allocations for police services.
The estimates committee in effect had to question the government on policing matters with one hand tied behind its back while the government was privy to much more detailed information that should have been tabled, that should have been allowed to be before the committee, for the public’s benefit.
That is what the committee was there for; it was there for the public’s benefit. Instead the police minister made these documents available very shortly after the estimates committee hearings ended. I must say that was convenient for him but made a sham of the whole democratic process in this place.
In fact, we all know now that the ACT police joint study was completed over a year ago, way back in June 2005. The then police minister, Mr Hargreaves, outrageously sat on that report and failed to expedite its release to the public. Now we can see why—because the joint study gives a damning insight into the severe lack of resources that ACT police have to police this community adequately.
The Emergency Services Authority is another area of major concern. While the committee report made some strong recommendations in this area—and I am pleased to see that we were able to stick to our guns on that—such as recommendation 40, which calls on the Auditor-General to undertake an audit of all ESA communications projects since the 2003 bushfires, there are still areas where the committee’s report does not go far enough.
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