Page 774 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 1 May 2007
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Keeping proper records would mean that spending decisions could actually be scrutinised and judged. There should be no reason why there is a reluctance to put this information before the parliament given our role in overseeing public expenditure.
We are due this very week to debate an amendment to the Government Procurement Act which has, as its primary focus, a clear statement that government procurement should be made on the basis of value for money. It is very easy to write a sentence into a piece of legislation and then forget about it. It is quite another thing to hold the government of the ACT to account.
No doubt the Chief Minister will try and distort this criticism into some kind of claim that he should go around from agency to agency rummaging through meal receipts and trying to micromanage spending decisions. That is not what we are asking for. What we are asking is that the government ensure that its departments keep clear records of their spending, including the purpose and outcome of spending decisions, and be in a position to respond to reasonable questions from the media which, with the exception of one government agency, they have failed to do and not come back, as happened with Mr Corbell, when more than $34,000 worth of justice department spending could not be scrutinised, with the answer, “The reason expenses have been blacked out is that the expenses are not associated with executives. The blacked out material deals with information that is outside the scope of your request.” Why is that necessary? Why is it necessary to hold this information back? If everything is straightforward, then let us explain it. These are concerns that the opposition holds.
Ministers must ensure that senior staff in the department are scrutinising the spending decisions of more junior staff, and that even more senior staff are then scrutinising this all the way back to the minister. It is the responsibility of the minister to ensure that the department is running efficiently and is accountable to the public for its decisions. Ministers must be proactive in dealing with their departments. They need to get in there and make sure that these matters are being managed appropriately at a level expected by the taxpaying community.
The issues raised by the Canberra Sunday Times have shown us that there is an unsatisfactory level of accountability in many departments concerning expenditure of this nature. They have shown that in some areas money is being spent hand over fist without a clear record being available to be produced indicating either the purpose for which that expenditure occurs or whether that outlay has in fact achieved its purpose.
This is not merely one or two items of expenditure that are being questioned. If that had been the case, I would not be wasting my time here. Let me say in relation to some of the Chief Minister’s earlier comments that when I first received that Auditor-General’s report, it did not cause a great deal of alarm. It dealt with seven agencies. There were some troubling comments about sponsorship, and I had privately reached a view about going to events sponsored by other government departments. But when the Canberra Times called me that night and said, “What is your view?” I said, “Well, on my first read of the report, I don’t think these are terribly alarming things.” They said, “We’ve got a whole lot more to show you,” and they did. They said, “What do you think about all of this?”(Time expired.)
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