Page 2653 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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We saw his attitude expressed towards the coroner when the coroner found against him. When the coroner made adverse findings against the Chief Minister, he lashed out at the coroner. He questioned her integrity. He questioned her motives. In fact, the legal action that the government launched was questioning whether or not she was biased. And this is the standard operating procedure of this government: if you do not like the finding of the independent auditor in this case, the independent umpire, criticise, attack, the umpire.
I challenge the Chief Minister again to say in this place where he believes the Auditor-General is in some way not doing her job in a professional manner, in a non-partisan manner. I have never seen anything to suggest that this Auditor-General is anything other than fully professional and seeks to go about her job, which she takes very seriously, of keeping this government accountable. It is an accountability measure.
Governments of all colours do not always like scrutiny and they do not always like accountability. But this Chief Minister takes to a new level his criticisms of the independent auditor, the independent Auditor-General, when he makes the comments that he has.
It is worth going into what Tu Pham had to say, before we get into the Chief Minister’s comments, in her opening statement to the estimates committee:
The government’s proposed funding for the audit office of $2.1 million in 2009-10 will not be sufficient for us to maintain the current audit capacity, nor will it be sufficient to increase our capacity to respond to the increase in government spending. In 2009-10, without any additional funding, the office will seek to reduce employee costs to return to a balanced budget, because, as you know, this year, 2008-09, we are operating at a deficit of $199,000.
So the office have been forced into a position where, just to do their job, they ran a deficit of $199,000—and this government is going to make that situation worse. She continued:
In a small office, we have very little capacity to cut costs elsewhere, so we had to forgo some employee costs. That is the biggest cost pressure on our office and ultimately it will lead to a reduction in our capacity to conduct our work, especially in performance audits.
It would appear from the Chief Minister’s comments that that is exactly what this government want. That is exactly what they want. That is an outcome that they appear comfortable with and that is an outcome that they appear happy about. She said:
… it will lead to a reduction in our capacity to conduct our work, especially in performance audits.
The Auditor-General delivers a report into the ACT Ambulance Service and then we see the response. We see the response from the Chief Minister. He compares it to New South Wales: “We are currently funding the Auditor-General four times more than
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