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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 1442 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

This was a new approach for the committee which came as an idea from Mr Symington, as I understand it, to involve the other secretaries in the process. That involvement was of great assistance to the committee. It assisted us to get through all of the work which was before the committee and in the development of the report. I thank all of those officers for their efforts on behalf of the committee. Finally, I would like to thank the community who responded well to the invitation to attend and have enhanced the report with their contributions. In her opening remarks when introducing the budget the Chief Minister said:

This Government has a vision for the future of Canberra as the clever, caring capital ...

The Estimates Committee has now scrutinised this "clever, caring budget" and come up with 50 recommendations to improve it. More importantly, the committee found that the budget has some uncaring and not very clever impacts on the Canberra community. If the Government is prepared to deal positively with the 50 recommendations and the multitude of concerns raised by the Estimates Committee, we may move in the direction that the Chief Minister's vision suggests. There are many areas of the budget which came in for comments and recommendations. In the first hearing of the Estimates Committee the Chief Minister indicated her priorities when she said in relation to the operating loss:

The role of this Assembly and certainly the Government is to address that operating loss and not to give or to produce a debt that our children cannot afford to pay. Mr Chair, this Estimates Committee will not have any credibility whatsoever, I am sure, in the view of the people of Canberra if it does not look at the total budgetary position ...

As chair of the committee I responded:

I am sure that members around the table on this Estimates Committee would like to have their hands on the levers and be responsible for constructing the budget but, Chief Minister, that is your job. It is our job to scrutinise it and we hope that we will do a good job of that.

The role of the Estimates Committee has always been to scrutinise the budget. This is done by examining the proposed budget and associated papers, the past record, particularly in relation to the last budget. It is in this way that Assembly members are able to examine and judge the priorities of the Government and the impact of those priorities on the community.

The major group of problems are those either related to the lack of relevant information, such as program cuts and policy changes, or lack of comparable information.

Every year the Assembly has been asked to accept and support a budget on faith. The papers have been presented differently each year, and added to this has been the changing presentation time. It would appear to the casual observer that those thousands

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