Page 2368 - Week 11 - Thursday, 2 November 1989
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The Committee, in preparing this report, accepts that the Government is responsible for introducing the Appropriation Bill to the Assembly and presenting the budget. It does, however, wish to emphasise that the Estimates Committee hearings and report should not be interpreted as support for or concurrence with the Government's budget nor its strategy.
That is a very critical and important part of this particular report. The next paragraph goes on to say:
The Committee has not commented upon all programs or sub-programs that are contained in the Appropriation Bill. Lack of comment in specific areas does not indicate that the Committee or any of its 12 members endorses those expenditure proposals.
Once again, they are two very important aspects of the committee's report. Indeed, you will note that Mr Duby and Ms Maher have submitted a statement of dissent on one particular matter. I will leave them to talk about it later on during this debate.
Now that that is out of the way, I am sure I speak on behalf of the members of the committee when I acknowledge the time and effort of all Ministers and ACT government officials involved in the inquiry. My later comments in relation to availability of information will refer to the fact that the first Estimates Committee provided a learning process for us all. I am sure that, in whatever form that committee takes next year, and I will not speculate on it in this particular forum at this time, the process of questioning and provision of information will be much improved. We all learned valuable lessons from this process.
The following comments are of a general nature relating to the overall process. The committee made some 20 recommendations, and I now make comments on some of the key recommendations. The committee believes that the budget papers should be presented in a clearer and more user-friendly format, and has made comment in this regard. One of the areas that I refer to is the requirement to provide ease of reference, cross-referencing, footnotes, et cetera. This is a very important aspect. I can appreciate that, in the Treasury's run-up to its first budget, it was still getting its processes together. As I said, footnotes and cross-referencing would be appropriate in aiding and abetting the process.
The committee also noted that program budgeting within agencies of the ACT Government is at various stages of development. Once again, although I understand program budgeting has been around in the Federal arena for some time, the ACT fiscus and the ACT process were given some dispensation from meeting with Federal Government
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