Page 3642 - Week 08 - Friday, 24 August 2012
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committee we all recognised the political imperatives of participating in this process. I think everyone agreed that that was important and they would be doing so. After much discussion in the committee on this bill, I believe that we have got the framework right, but it will of course be up to others in this campaign and into the future to determine how they wish to participate. An important part of this bill is the guidance it provides to both members of the Assembly and public servants about the practices of election commitment costing.
The departure from the normal course of government and politics can cause challenges. This bill seeks to address these challenges by providing clarity on the respective roles and responsibilities of all parties concerned during the period. Therefore, in formulating this bill, the government has taken into careful consideration the obligation of public servants to continue to serve the government of the day whilst at the same time meeting their legal obligations that are imposed under this bill.
Finally, Mr Assistant Speaker, it is important that any new process be reviewed to assess its success, its achievement against its stated objectives, and to examine any possible improvements. For this reason it is a very sensible measure that the bill requires a review to be undertaken after this October 2012 election and that that report be presented to the Assembly in October 2013 or soon after. The government is committed to improving the territory’s financial frameworks, and the bill provides a robust model for enhancing the costing of election commitments in the territory.
Before wrapping up debate in the in-principle stage, I will signal that the government will not oppose the amendment being put forward by Mr Rattenbury. I did seek advice from Treasury officials in relation to the issues that were brought forward about the commencement of this particular piece of legislation. Their view was that if the intent of the amendment was to spread the workload and make it easier for Treasury officials to undertake the costing of election commitments then not actually having to cost them twice, once before PEBU and once after, would in fact be a better way for the Assembly to assist in reducing their workload.
Nonetheless, for the sake of, what, 11 or 12 days, and given the likelihood of there not being a flood of election commitments lodged in that period, I think in the end it is not worth quibbling over 11 days. Nonetheless, the amendments that have been moved by Mr Rattenbury are not really, on balance, a significant improvement but, frankly, at this stage of the Assembly I do not think it is worth calling a division on them. So the government will not be opposing those.
Before I conclude, I would just make one observation. The press release that was issued by the Greens—and Mr Rattenbury commented on it in his statement—amused me for two reasons. The first was that in counting up the costs, or the alleged costs, of election commitments to date, there was the collecting of both capital and recurrent expenditure together. An important trick for new players in this process is that you cannot combine recurrent and capital expenditure commitments. They have differing impacts on the budget bottom line.
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