Page 402 - Week 01 - Thursday, 11 December 2008
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I believe that we were subjected to a more rigorous process through Treasury in examining our promises than any opposition has been put through, and they all stood up. They were sensible cuts. The government have not bothered to make any of those cuts. They will now be driving us into a deficit. They are now pushing through an appropriation bill and not even allowing us to properly scrutinise it. We hope that this is not the pattern of things to come over the next four years.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (7.56): I am quite flattered that Brendan has been taking note of what I have had to say in the last few days; it has been quoted back again. What I wanted to pick up on is the start of that speech the other day, and at the start the other day I said:
It is never a good process to pass legislation without scrutinising it carefully. Our key concern here is that the appropriation bill is a mechanism to deliver time-critical spending, including the promised pre-Christmas support for emergency community services, which, in terms of effective delivery, is already down to the wire.
This appropriation also puts in place some of the key mechanisms that we need to have operating for the start of next year so that the ACT government and community can start to deal with the economic crisis and climate change challenge that everyone knows we face. That includes funding for the new department and resources for the new committee that will scrutinise it.
So that was the start of those comments the other day.
The Greens will support this bill in principle. I would like to be inordinately clear here: we are pleased to take this debate through the detail stage, because it is the only scrutiny we have available to us with this time frame. We will not be saying a lot ourselves but simply highlighting some of the aspects of this appropriation that we recognise as important and time critical and raising a few questions of our own.
More importantly, we are interested in hearing the concerns and interpretations raised by the opposition in this debate and the government’s response. As annual report hearings for all committees are just around the corner, I am very confident that, following this debate, we will be much better informed to follow up on matters of interest or concern through that process.
I only ask that the other members stick to the point and particularly avoid the temptation to repeat themselves or their colleagues. I outlined on Tuesday when the bill was presented in this place that, while we are concerned about the short time, we have to consider the bill. A considerable amount of the content relates to time-critical spending for emergency community services and measures to stimulate the ACT economy in a time of economic crisis. In addition, we are in an election year, and there has been an unreasonable delay in delivering some of the measures, and further delay needs to be avoided.
One has only to look at the front pages of the Canberra Times. Mr Seselja has been happy to provide us with a few this evening. On Wednesday, the Canberra Times had details of this bill. They were relieved to see the real difference that these measures
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