Page 2948 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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events in the Chief Minister’s Department. We have a number of areas that seem to have a finger in a pie but what is hard to achieve is a detailed picture of how it all fits together.
It is interesting that we have the regular banter: “Have you got the numbers?” The minister says, “Yes, I have got the numbers.” We said, “Can we have the numbers?” He says, “I will give you the numbers.” He was able to provide them, which is lovely, but it does go to the point about the ease with which one can read the budget. We do this for a living. It is important that we know the detail in it. If the public is trying to find out—and I often have complaints from the public: “How do I find this? Where is this number?”—they have difficulty relating what is in the budget papers back to the reality.
To give the minister his due, he had the numbers there and he made them available. My question would be: “Why can’t we have some of this detail laid out more clearly in the budget papers?” If they are not going to go into the budget papers, perhaps they could go in the minister’s press releases. Ideally it is better in the budget papers. I think Mr Barr agreed with that. It would be good if some of the other ministers took his lead on this issue, because some of the other budget lines suffer from exactly the same problem as well.
As to Floriade, I think we all love Floriade and the presentation and the excellent reputation it has achieved. I do note the reduction in the overall visitor numbers in 2008, the split between the standard Floriade event and the NightFest. If the NightFest had not been held, then I think a case could be made that the numbers would have fallen. The innovation is good. Unfortunately, the loss on the NightFest is not good, and we will see an additional appropriation for this year’s event.
There were assurances made when it was first announced that it would run to budget and be a success, but they were not met. I think we need to have some concerns about the due diligence that was undertaken to establish that baseline. When you add a new facet to an event or a new part to a program, I think we need to be realistic, particularly about what it is that we really are funding and what it is that we can achieve.
The new autumn event was also discussed during the estimates. The government proposed a new autumn event. A large part of the additional $5 million will be spent on the autumn event. Unfortunately, we still do not know the details. Again, this place is being asked to appropriate money for something that all we know about is that it is a new autumn event and that it appears that the Stanhope government will be purchasing the event.
I refer to page 1202 of Hansard where I talked about a description in one of the papers about “driving the acquisition and development of a new event”. It is interesting that we cannot actually come up with our own event but the minister also could not give us the detail of what that event might be.
I think that is quite fascinating, coming from the minister who squibbed at providing an initial $300,000 or so to ensure the future of the former Balloon Festival, which
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