Page 2097 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 22 June 2010
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We saw such a sanitising of that evidence by the committee that it could have been written by the department. Ms Le’s evidence was amended beyond recognition. I do not know if there was anything on kinship carers in the original draft, which was noted. But in the final report, nowhere do we see any of that damning evidence from Ms Le.
The role of the committee is not to make the government’s arguments for them; the role of the committee is to accurately reflect what was put to the committee, give ministers the opportunity to respond and draw conclusions and make recommendations. There is none of that here. The kinship carers have been silenced in this report, along with other groups.
We see it also in relation to other groups. We heard, indeed, about Indigenous funding. We had Mr Terry Williams, the chair of the Indigenous body, stating that the gap is only getting wider. He said:
As to the funds that have been put into the budget at the moment, all I can say is that, truly, the allocation of funds directed to Indigenous people in the ACT is horrific.
It is horrific, but it is not reflected in the committee’s report. Mr Williams’s evidence is silenced; Mr Williams’s point of view is not reflected. It is not even quoted. The government has the opportunity to respond; others have the opportunity to respond. We should actually put that out there for people to read so that someone reading this report will know that these are the views of the Indigenous community and these are the views of the government in response to that. We do not have that; it is not reflected.
This report is a whitewash. It is a reflection, unfortunately, of a process that seemed more about protecting the government than scrutinising the government; more about protecting the alliance partners than actually asking the hard questions that the government needs to be asked and that the community wants us to ask on their behalf.
There are a number of other things that are not in the report. I do not believe the word “deficit” appears anywhere in the report. We have got a budget that is going to be delivering a lot of deficits—hundreds of millions of dollars worth of deficits are projected. We have a committee process that is meant to look at the budget and the implications for the ACT. The many deficits that we see projected would be something that perhaps others would see as noteworthy, but there is no room for that in the report.
It is worth going to some of what was outlined in the dissenting report, which makes the case in relation to some of our real concerns about the budget and about what came out of the estimates process. One is the issue around the amount of GST that has been given up by the ACT—that has been withheld from the ACT—as opposed to other jurisdictions. Ms Hunter mentioned in her speech that there was something like 44 pages of Hansard in relation to that, yet there is nothing in relation to a recommendation that actually calls on the government to do anything substantive. I could not see anywhere in there where it actually used the amount of GST that is
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