Page 2948 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 August 2015
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appropriation the Treasurer may have got there but certainly did not honour the spirit of the law. Once again I consider this regrettable.
I acknowledge some learning leeway is needed here because these laws are relatively new. I will be expecting better compliance with both the letter and the spirit of the law in the future.
It is also worth considering that although we have gone a long way in becoming a grown-up parliament with a separate appropriation which is the envy of many parliaments in this country, I think we still have a long way to go. In discussions with my colleague the Speaker of the New Zealand parliament I have learned recently that in the New Zealand parliament the appropriation is determined by the Speaker and the equivalent of the administration and procedure committee here, and it is put to the Treasury and it may not be modified by the Treasury and the appropriation which is sought by the legislature must be provided by the Treasury. That of course means that the legislature has to be modest and appropriate in its demands and not overreach, but so far the world has not come to an end in New Zealand where there is no leeway for the Treasury to say that they disagree with the legislature on the amount that needs to be appropriated.
All of this said, I do acknowledge the Chief Minister’s support for some budget-neutral security improvements. Primarily these consist of tighter controls over all people entering the Assembly building including building occupants. These controls are being explored and will be tested and hopefully implemented as soon as possible. The matter of security is one of ongoing concern to me, and I hope that I can ensure that we do all that we possibly can within reason to ensure that members are safe within the Assembly.
That being said, I am, generally speaking, pleased with the process. This is the first year that the protocols between the Assembly and the Chief Minister in relation to the formation of the budget have been put out for a proper run, and they worked fairly effectively. I thank the staff of the Office of the Legislative Assembly, especially the governance area, for the work that they have done in relation to the protocols and I also thank the cooperation of the Chief Minister’s department and Treasury in this matter.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (9.23): To back up the Speaker, I think it is very important that we understand the implication of not funding the security officer position for the Assembly. I certainly hope it is something that we do not come to regret but security is an issue that is with us. That issue, the need for heightened security, will be with us for some time, I suspect. I think it is unfortunate that that line has not been supported.
With regard to the funding for the Auditor-General, again it has been a long-held view that I have had that we should be moving to a fifty-fifty split of the Auditor-General’s budget—50 per cent of budget to be spent on the financials, 50 per cent to be on performance. We did have agreement for that, I think, in the 2012-13 budget. It lasted for a year and then it disappeared, the move to get to that amount, so that we progressively lift from approximately seven or eight audits a year to about 12, which would be reasonable, I suspect, for a jurisdiction of this size.
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