Page 1929 - Week 05 - Thursday, 6 May 2010
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have outlined today. These questions need to be resolved before the Greens can be sure that the funding in the budget really is being best directed towards achieving a safer and more just Canberra community. I hope that when it comes to the estimates process we do not see some of the repeats we saw last year, when many of the questions about simple program funding could not be answered in the estimates process and had to be taken on notice.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (5.10): I am pleased to see that the government has agreed to fund a number of areas that the Greens have lobbied for over the years. But I am also very disappointed that there are a number of key areas for the government’s future that simply have not been funded.
The lack of general direction and long-term priority shown by the budget is frustrating for everyone involved. It is particularly frustrating where the community has worked with the government to develop long-term strategies and believes that there are agreed priorities and plans, and then the budget comes down and the community simply cannot find out what has happened. The problem is that the indicators from the plans do not follow through to the budget, so it is incredibly hard for anybody—the community in particular, but even us here in the Assembly—to find out what exactly is happening as the focus of spending activity.
How can we find out how much the government is spending on climate change? What is the expenditure on weathering the change? These are excellent questions which you cannot with any degree of ease answer from these budget papers. That is why there are so many questions taken on notice in the estimates process. I have said before and I will say again—I said it again this morning—that we need to improve the budget papers so that the Assembly and the community do not have to waste their time trying to find information which we know the government has, which we know is in the budget papers. This would reduce work for the government as well as for the community and the members.
Let me give an example of how impenetrable some of this is. Waste and recycling in TAMS is stated to be $28.7 million, yet I can account for only $3.7 million in the line items shown in the budget paper. And again we have things misclassified. We have got bulky waste pick-up labelled under climate change spending; it is basically a much-needed social initiative, not about climate change.
I will now come to talk to the TAMS budget. TAMS is, of course, one of the biggest areas of government spending. There are a few positives there. Specifically, I mention the $100,000 for a feasibility study for a Gungahlin shopfront. I have to agree with Mr Seselja’s comments that we hardly need $100,000 for that study, but it is an item in the parliamentary agreement, so I am very pleased that the government has started on it.
In general, I am disappointed to say that TAMS spending remains basically business as usual. The Greens see some good opportunities for cheap and smart initiatives to improve Canberra for the future. The most disappointing area is that of waste and resource recovery. Despite the persistent effort of the Greens, including having waste initiatives in our parliamentary agreement, the government still ignores the solutions
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