Page 4104 - Week 13 - Thursday, 10 November 1994
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Each year for four years the Assembly, through its Estimates Committee, gradually brought the budget and the reporting statements that flowed from it into an increasingly improved format. It was informative, and the Treasury was helpful and did its best to produce information you could compare to see what was happening from one year to the next. I thought that for the first four years we were doing very well. The Estimates Committee would go through every year and suggest ways in which the information could be improved, the Treasury would pick that up, and the next year we got a little better. Something happened in 1993-94, and the budget papers changed their format. We know why they did. We knew that that was the first year of a transition to a new basis of accounting and reporting, which had been agreed at a national level. The 1994-95 budget is different again, and we are going through a period of change. I do not have any particular objection to that, but the problem is that we have totally lost the comparability of data. Those of us who went through the Estimates Committee process over the last few days are well aware that a lot of information we previously had simply was not available this year. That, to me, is a retrograde step.
By way of example, I will do a short comparison. The Treasurer's quarterly financial statement for the quarter ended 30 June 1994 gives a comprehensive breakdown of expenditure, not only for the quarter but cumulatively for the year. The bottom line shows that total expenditure for last year was $1,310m. It is straightforward, it is explained in detail, and you can see where the money went. If you look at the document that was tabled today by the Chief Minister, which is the aggregate financial statement with an audit opinion for all of last year, that figure coincides: Summary of expenditure for the year, $1,310m. So far so good. We are doing fine.
Then I have a document the Chief Minister tabled a few weeks ago called "Report on the 1993-94 Budget Outcomes". There are no explanatory notes setting out the basis on which these figures have been compiled, how they relate to those, or whether they do. When somebody who is not aware of what all that paperwork is about picks this up and turns to page 10 or page 12 or page 14, they get some figures that do not coincide with those at all. This document tells us that our outlays by purpose in total for last fiscal year were $1,214m. That is a considerable difference. There is nothing here to explain why we have $1,214m in this book and $1,310m in other more informative documents. I would suggest that anybody who picked up this document and thought they were going to get a comprehensive statement about last year's budget would be sadly disappointed. First of all, it appears in a different format. I think I know why it is in a different format, but somebody who picked this up would wonder why there is no program information in here and why the figures differ from the figures in those other documents.
Over the next three or four years, the Estimates Committee and the Assembly are obviously going to have to go through the same exercise we went through for the first four years of the life of this Assembly and try to get the information in a format that is comparable, that is comprehensive, that is consistent. With a break from last year to this year, I do not quite know how we are going to do that. I suppose that what I am asking is that the Treasurer and the Treasury take the matter on board and see whether they can come up with a crosswalk from fiscal accounting to the other form of accounting, so that those of us who are not very well informed on accounting and reporting and the like can at least follow what is happening from one year to the next.
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