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Yesterday Mrs Carnell announced that, as part of her revised Administrative Arrangements, “the Government will be introducing into the Assembly corresponding amendments to the Supply Bill to reflect the new structures I have announced”. We have had those amendments all of three or four minutes, Mr Speaker, and I, for one, have not had time to read them, let alone to digest them. Again, I find this the absolute height of sloppiness. It shows, again, a high-handed contempt for this Assembly and for this Assembly's role in scrutinising the Government's financial programs. Mr Speaker, even with these amendments, there is still no explanation of what is a program and what is an administrative unit, and I await Mrs Carnell's advice on that. For example, education and training appears to include public schooling, private schooling and training; but how much is proposed for any one of those is simply left unstated.

Mr Speaker, I regard the accountability to this Assembly as being significantly reduced by the format of these documents. So much for open and accountable government. What a sham! This Government has taken every opportunity to add to the secrecy, to deny members of this Assembly information to which we are entitled. I would like to warn the Government that this lack of accountability to the Assembly is a matter which will be closely reviewed during the budget process, and it has not started off very well.

I regard the Supply Bill as a deliberate attempt to obscure spending patterns and to reduce the scrutiny by this Assembly because it, in fact, makes a year-on-year comparison virtually impossible. If there is further evidence of this obfuscation - and, Mr Speaker, I regard the work being done by Mr Nicholls as implying that there will be - I will certainly need to require full reconciliations to subprogram level to enable proper comparisons to be made with previous years. In other words, Mr Speaker, if I see in the future some kind of shonky balance sheet approach instead of the nationally agreed government finance statistics method, the GFS method, of financial reporting, we will all know that, indeed, this Government has something to hide. The only way that the Assembly could then scrutinise properly any such financial reporting would be by such a full reconciliation. It seems to me, Mr Speaker, that that is precisely what we will require in time to come. Mr Speaker, as I said, I have no intention of denying supply. I regard it as crucial that the programs of the Government Service continue and that people continue to be paid and be confident that that will be the case.

I will finish by saying that the need for this Supply Bill has arisen only because the Government has put back the budget by another three months. In his comments on the previous motion, Mr Kaine, I think it was, referred to the fact that all of us in the Assembly had agreed that the early budget timetable was by far the best not just for our own public service departments but also for the community groups and for the business sector in the ACT. We are enabled to make the budget earlier because of the very significant earlier budget now adopted by the Federal Government. Of course, with so much of our budget funds, our revenue, coming from the Federal Government, we do need to know precisely what we are getting before we finally frame the budget. We do know that now. We have had the Federal budget - last month, in May - just as we did last year, and it ought to be possible for this Government to bring down a budget before the end of the financial year. That was the agreed timing that I thought everybody in the Assembly last year was happy with. However, Mrs Carnell has chosen not to do that; but rather to delay the budget until September, and, as a result, we have this additional Supply Bill.

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