Page 2753 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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There are some recommendations about openness and accountability in the budget and I notice the smug response in the response. We said, “Please give us some lines that are easy to understand and that tell us the true position of the funding for business.” Of course, because of the way it is presented and is obfuscated, the smirky response comes back, “Just because you can’t read properly, we’ll make it clearer in the future.”
But this is a standard feature of the budgets of this government, and has been for some time. A number of recommendations of a number of committee reports said, “Can we have a simple one-line for the environment, for women, for Indigenous, for multicultural, for business, for tourism, for sport and rec?” Some of them are there now. We are getting there very slowly but, again, it is this government and their inability to be up-front, to be honest and open, that really puts any understanding of the budget at risk.
There is some commentary about sustainability assessment and triple-bottom-line reporting. It is interesting that, in relation to recommendation 24 and recommendation 25, which I think you mentioned, Madam Assistant Speaker Le Couteur, the government does not agree to either of them. It is a shame really, because people genuinely were trying to put forward recommendations that we thought the government could live with and that we thought would assist people in trying to understand the budget of their government.
But when you ask for the government to put forward statements about how they take into account the object of ecological sustainability, including greenhouse gas emissions, and the government just says, “Not agreed; budget paper 3 already has a chapter,” clearly, it is not clear enough. And this is symptomatic of so much that we see in this budget. It is unfortunate that the government wants to act in this way but, again, it is a government that I do not think has learned the fact that they are not a majority and that they will be held even more accountable than they have been in the past.
There are still a couple of issues outstanding between the territory and the commonwealth, in particular the torch relay and the cost of the land that we sold to the federal government at the defence precincts and that still has not been paid for. (Time expired.)
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (8.06): I would like to speak specifically about recommendation 31 of the estimates committee. I will just read it out for the purposes of everyone in the chamber:
The Committee recommends that funding for the Canberra International Arboretum and Gardens not be counted as a climate change initiative until there is a cost benefit analysis on climate change outcomes from the Arboretum, including the carbon emissions generated and offset.
The government’s response is simply to note this recommendation.
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