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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (27 March) . . Page.. 725 ..

MR KAINE (3.44): Mr Speaker, oh how the uninformed rush in where the informed fear to tread. I think that Mr Whitecross just made a speech that he is going to live to regret because it is in Hansard. There will come a time when Mr Whitecross is going to regret his intemperate and ill-informed comments. Mr Moore, I have no doubt, had a good reason for saying what he did. I suggest that he is far more informed on the budgetary process than Mr Whitecross is; but Mr Whitecross has to jump on the bandwagon, and he is obviously talking about things of which he has no knowledge at all. He is the potential Treasurer of the Territory should this Government ever trip up and fall, or if it does not get elected next time and he is still the leader. He will be the Treasurer. All I can say is, "Ho hum".

Mr Whitecross talks about the difficulties of scrutinising the budget when it is not brought down until September. Well, that has been the case for all but one year since we have had self-government, and we have managed it very well. The government of the day has never got off lightly because the Estimates Committee of the year has fudged it or has not done its job right. All I can suggest is that Mr Whitecross does not like working under any sort of pressure. He wants to be able to sit back for weeks on end, indulge himself, and go through the budget, all the nitty-gritty, when in fact the purpose is to examine the structure of the budget rather than its detail. I will be fascinated to watch the way that this new shadow Treasurer performs in the Estimates Committee under the same conditions that most of us have had to work under all our lives. It is nothing new at all. As I say, I think Mr Whitecross is demonstrating his lack of knowledge and his ineptitude. Maybe Mr Berry will be taking the job earlier than any of us can possibly conceive at the moment.

MS FOLLETT (3.46): I would like to make a couple of quick comments on this matter. I think it is entirely possible for the Government to produce its budget very much faster than the September date that Mrs Carnell has now given us. I have long held the view that governments ought to make every endeavour to bring down their budgets before the end of the financial year. There are good reasons for this. The first of those is to allow certainty in departments and agencies as to the extent of their budget funding and their program for the forthcoming year. The second reason is to fit in with our business community who budget on a financial year basis themselves and who, I think, benefit greatly from knowing, for instance, what the revenue regime from the Government will be for the forthcoming year. As for the many community groups who receive funding through the ACT budget, either directly or indirectly, an early budget obviously allows them much greater certainty in their own planning for the forthcoming year. So there is a large number of reasons why an early budget is very desirable.

I would also like to address a couple of issues that Mrs Carnell raised about how much detailed information one has at the time of framing a budget. The fact is that every budget so far in this Territory has been framed on the basis of assumptions and projections. That is a fact of life. Mr Speaker, if Mrs Carnell cared to check, the remnants of what used to be Treasury will have done a large amount of work on the forthcoming budget already. They will have done that on the basis of projections and of information that has come to them through the previous year.

Mrs Carnell: Not on untied grants.

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