Page 2738 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 June 2010
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If there is an increase from $1 million to $2 million, that is an increase of $1 million, a 100 per cent or a doubling of the funding. On the other hand, if there is an increase from $400 million to $450 million, that is an increase of $50 million or 13 per cent. Obviously, an increase from a small base can be exaggerated, whereas the Canberra Hospital has received an additional $50 million, which is 50 times the annual funding that the Auditor-General gets from the budget. So the Chief Minister’s rhetoric must not go unchallenged. Moreover, his criticisms—indeed, many times personal criticisms—of the ACT Auditor-General have been repudiated by the recent report, the independent audit, by the former Auditor-General of New South Wales, Mr Bob Sendt.
You only have to look at what was said in the report. Mr Sendt found:
… the ACT Audit Office is providing an important service in an efficient and effective manner, and the Legislative Assembly and people of the Australian Capital Territory are achieving good value from the Office’s use of the taxpayer’s dollar. It achieves this notwithstanding the relatively small size of the Office, the complexity of its role and the demands upon it.
That is quite clearly a slap in the face for the Chief Minister after what he has been saying. Mr Sendt went on to say about the small size of the office:
The ACT Audit Office’s relatively small size does not appear to have impacted significantly on its cost structure or the quality of services it provides.
So the allegation put forward by the Chief Minister that somehow the Auditor-General had the best funded service in the country per capita is blown out of the water. In regard to performance audits, Mr Sendt went on to say:
… the ACT Legislative Assembly and the public obtain a valuable and professional service from the Office for the funds allocated to it for undertaking performance audits.
I guess the real question is: will the Chief Minister come and apologise for all of the allegations that he has made and the doubt that he has cast on the audit office and its fairness in treatment of audit issues? It is interesting to look at page 37 of the report about performance audits. People have to understand there are two sorts of audits the Auditor-General does. She does the financial audits. She has to do those; they are legislated for. She charges fees for those, and they provide a certain amount of her budget.
The allocation in the budget from this appropriation bill, of course, pays for then any other additional costs to run the office, and what is left over goes to performance audits. It is often the performance audits that are the most interesting of the audits that the Auditor-General does. The financial audits, given the day and age, the computing and the accounting standards that we have in place, tend to be very non-controversial. The performance audits, of course, are the ones that raise the hackles of the Chief Minister. And what does Bob Sendt say about the funding of performance audits? He says:
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