Page 1817 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 June 2016
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The bill proposes the creation of a parliamentary budget officer as an officer of the Legislative Assembly. The bill also provides for the establishment of an office of the parliamentary budget officer, the staff of which would be employed under the Public Sector Management Act.
I am sure the shadow treasurer is aware that in 2009 the Standing Committee on Administration and Procedure conducted an inquiry into the merit of appointing a parliamentary budget officer. At that time, the report recommended against a parliamentary budget officer, as it would be too expensive for a jurisdiction the size of the ACT. Instead, as recommended by the committee and agreed by the government, a consultant review of the budget is now conducted each year to assist the Assembly’s scrutiny of the budget.
Since the 2009 consideration, a full-time parliamentary budget officer has been in place at the commonwealth level, and one has been established for election periods only in the largest state, New South Wales. No other state or territory has such an office.
I note that in Mr Smyth’s bill there has been no costing or indicative costing provided for the proposal, but let us be clear that for such an office to be workable or to have any credibility, it would require significant resourcing. You simply cannot put two people in a room and call it a parliamentary budget office. There would not be the skill level, the capacity or the authority for such a body to be relied upon by members of the Assembly.
I have a range of other concerns in relation to the role of a permanent office with what is clearly a highly fluctuating workload. There could be 3½ years of complete inactivity where you would have a senior officer having nothing to do for long periods of time but then being required to call upon Treasury or other ACT government agencies to provide a significant secondment of staff to cope with an influx of costing requests at the tail end of a parliamentary term. There is no doubt that there would be difficulty in attracting senior and experienced staff for such an uneven workload.
Having said that, I am happy for these and other issues to be explored more fully by a select committee. I think the appropriate select committee might well be to put the band back together—to bring the Treasury spokespeople for each party back. We did this work in the election costings bill four years ago—at about this time in the election cycle too, I suspect. So we have demonstrated a capacity, Mr Smyth, Mr Rattenbury and I, to work together on these issues and find an agreeable compromise to bring back to this place.
I think that is worth trying again. We should look at possible alternatives that could provide members with costings support without incurring the expense and logistical difficulties of a permanent office. I think there is some merit in looking at that, evaluating how the election costings bill performed in the last election, and then thinking ahead to a future parliament and a future Assembly, where there will be 25 members, there may be more crossbench members and there may be opportunities for the current arrangements to be restructured to better reflect that new circumstance.
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