Page 5605 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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MR SMYTH: People say in this place time and again—it has come from Liberal Party members, the Greens and Labor members—that you have got to be able to prepare data over a sequence. When you table a report in this place that purports to be a midyear review when it is set on data from October, November and December then it is not a midyear review. It seems that the argument being made is that Mr Quinlan did not say it had to be 31 December. But Mr Quinlan did say that.
Ms Gallagher: It’s a budget review.
MR SMYTH: Read his speech. We will remove the words “midyear review” from your documents because the last two had “midyear review”. Anybody reading them would have picked up that this was a midyear review. Midyear is quite clear. Midyear is 31 December, and Ted Quinlin said that. When Mr Quinlan came here in 2003 he built on the work of 2002 when we tried to set up frameworks. There was a lot of bipartisan support for that, unlike today. Ted said:
This bill also introduces a requirement for a midyear budget review, to be presented to the Assembly 45 days after the end of the calendar year.
The review occurs at the end of the calendar year. For those who do not understand that, that is 31 December. He went on to say:
A review of the financial policy objectives and strategies statement will also be included in the midyear review. The proposed timing will align presentation of this information to the Legislative Assembly with the quarterly financial statements.
In other words: “We don’t actually want to do extra work because we know we are doing the updates on 31 December to the financials anyway. We’ll align that with this because it’s a logical point to do it.” We have not heard a single substantive argument against that today. The argument was about flexibility. It is interesting that you would be flexible in what you report and what data you put into a report.
Ms Gallagher: You were some of the people asking me for it.
MR SMYTH: I fully expected to get some answers. I fully expected Treasury to be updating you on a regular period. I would have thought they would be telling you that on a Monday morning when they come down to do their briefs before cabinet.
Ms Gallagher: They don’t update the bottom line every week.
MR SMYTH: We will look at that in a minute. The problem is that we are now saying that we need to be flexible. Why do we need to be flexible? That is about accountability, not flexibility. No-one is saying the government only do these reports on that day. If you want flexibility, the government can do as many reports as they like. Accountability, in many ways, is not flexibility. When I hear “flexibility” I hear “getting around it”. When I hear “flexibility” I hear “I’ll do what suits me politically”. That is flexibility. Flexibility in this case is not accountability. The Stanhope government always ran on “more honest, more open, more accountable”, but now it is
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