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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1504 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

This Assembly's ascendancy on this issue has already been exercised. You can endorse the Audit Act which gives you certain powers. You might choose not to use those powers because you would rather go through an exercise of these cheap theatrics to try to create an impression that something positive has come out of the worst health budget blow-out ever. There is nothing positive. Nothing positive can come out of it, because the news is all bad.

Mr Humphries: On a point of order, Mr Speaker: Mr Berry said that mine was the worst budget. I resent his denying me that special place in the pantheon. I would ask him to clarify his intentions.

MR SPEAKER: There is no point of order.

MR BERRY: The news is all bad, and they will be popping up and down like this all the time over this issue because they do not want to hear about it. No matter how you approach the issue, this has been an issue of public relations rather than good sense.

Mrs Carnell had an option open to her under the Audit Act to move with propriety and within the law to deal with this issue, and face the music over her budget blow-out in Health. Well, she is facing the music over the budget blow-out in Health; there is no question about that. She has been censured for her mismanagement of the health budget and she has been censured for recklessly misleading the Assembly over health matters. She has been the subject of significant scrutiny, and she would not want to be questioned on this issue either. Here we have a situation where the media relations team is called in, but it has failed because the Assembly committee, through the processes, has discovered exactly what happened.

Where do we go? What is Mrs Carnell's reaction then? We got a letter in the course of the Assembly inquiry in relation to where the $14.2m would come from, and it is described thus:

Potential sources could include a degree of underspending in capital works, -

"could include" -

a degree of underexpenditure in the centrally held redundancy pool -

maybe -

and possibly by utilising a portion of the Treasurer's Advance.

How on earth could you call that better scrutiny? They did not know when they came to the Estimates Committee where they would be getting the money from, and Mrs Carnell has the hide to stand up and say that this is to allow a process like an estimates committee to scrutinise her actions. They could not tell us. Indeed, this was all compounded when her highly qualified, highly paid, experienced officials came up with this answer in response to a question about how much they would spend: "Somewhere between $1 and $14.2m". I tell you what; that is a wide ambit. You have all the bases covered; you cannot make a mistake; you have them all covered.

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