Page 2996 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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Quamby is empty most of the time, or close to empty most of the time. We have this large space which is underutilised. It ended up costing twice what was originally planned. We see it again with the move of the mental health facility to the old Quamby site. That mere process has seen a blow-out of $3 million. It was instructive today to hear members of the opposition asking Ms Burch about the government’s commitment to spend $4 million on building two new childcare centres—that was the promise: $4 million to build two new childcare centres—where they are needed. When I said, “Hang on, you’re refurbishing an old building and calling that a childcare centre and it is going to cost you $4 million,” Ms Gallagher interjected and said, “Well, we’ve over-delivered on that one.” We have over-delivered. It has cost twice as much. If your measure is the Stanhope Government’s measure, which is how much money we spend on things, of course we have over-delivered: “You wanted a $2 million childcare centre. Don’t worry about that. We’ll give you a $4 million childcare centre.”
The question is: where is the money going to come from for the other childcare centre? This is the tenor of the government. This is the tenor of the stewardship of this minister, who is presiding over budget blow-outs at Bimberi, over-delivering on childcare centres by spending twice as much on the childcare centre, and supervising budget blow-out after budget blow-out, deficit after deficit, in the good times. When it comes to the nitty-gritty of analysing the budget, there is a paucity of information around. I suppose part of the reason why the Stanhope government can only measure things by how much money they have spent on it is that they have not actually done any of the other work.
Mr Assistant Speaker Hargreaves, you and I have been in this place for a long time. You have been involved in estimates committees for longer than I have. I recall, year in, year out, the cry from estimates committees—not this one, I note—that we need more and better performance measures and that how much money you spend on something is not a performance measure. So this year the Liberal opposition went in search of performance measures. We went in search of how the money was being spent in departments. We asked questions of a variety of departments. The general approach that we discussed was to ask: “In relation to every output class, what were the programs that were underpinned? What programs came under that output class? How much money was spent in each of those programs and what was the staffing allocation for each of those programs?”
You have got output class 3.1 in a department—let us choose a department, DECCEW, so it has got a name attached to it—and it seems reasonable to ask: “Under that output class, what programs are actually delivered? How many people work there, what does it cost and what does it cost to run each individual program?” Time after time the answer that came back from a minister, in some form or other, was: “We do not collect that information in that form and it would be too hard to do.” There is example after example:
Please provide a list of initiatives or programs that are run under each output.
What is the budget cost for each in 2009-10 and 2010-11?
How many staff (by ASL) work in each, and what is the level of each staff member?
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