Page 1324 - Week 04 - Thursday, 10 April 2008
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that those across the chamber are not concerned about. It is sad that we now have a position where, firstly, the crossbenchers have abrogated the responsibility of being part of the entire estimates process by simply saying, “We do not intend to participate as members of the committee. We will make cameo roles. We will appear. We will write the press releases and zip on down, but we are not prepared to do the hard work.”
The interesting thing is that the Stanhope opposition were very critical of the committee system under the previous Liberal government but they are now going such a long way in the other direction to what they promised that I think the hypocrisy will be noticed by all. If they have any integrity left in regard to their code of good governance and they want to ensure that the Legislative Assembly is able to provide the appropriate scrutiny of the government of the day, they will withdraw this amendment, because all it means is that they will have the chair—and we all know the chair controls the resources and the writing of the report—and they will have the numbers to put whatever they want in the report. And that is not the tradition that has been established in this place over a long time, particularly in the committee system.
The committee system in this place used to be one of the gems of this place. Certainly, in the first term I was here, from 1998 to 2001, the committees always operated in a bipartisan way, where they could, and the number of dissenting reports was relatively small in comparison to what we are seeing now under majority government. I think there is a lesson in that for all of us. If the government are sure that their budget is accurate, if the government are sure that the underlying principles that form their budget are correct, if the government are sure that their budget will deliver what they say it will, then they should not be afraid to face the appropriate scrutiny which they guarantee in their code of good governance. What one can only read into that is that they do not believe appropriate scrutiny is what they want of their budget because their budget will not stand that scrutiny.
Mr Corbell said the last debate was 16 hours and, gee, that was a long time and that it was perhaps the longest—if not the second-longest—debate that we have ever had on the budget. It was the biggest budget we have ever had—the biggest budget, by a long shot, almost $3.2 billion. For 16 hours, that is only about $200 million an hour that we were passing and is about $3.5 million a minute.
I think that level of expenditure is worthy of scrutiny; it is worthy of the debate. It is a shame that the government seem to believe that it is not. If they are not willing to stand up and defend their budget in this way and if they are not willing to face scrutiny in this way, one can only draw the conclusion that their budget will not withstand the scrutiny.
We know from the 2006-07 budget that the foundation of that budget, the functional review into the public service in the ACT and the provision of service in the ACT, has never been released. And you can only assume from that that it would not bear the scrutiny of daylight. I think there are a number of examples.
There is an abridged version of it in the Way forward document. So many of the numbers in the Way forward document have been called into doubt by various
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