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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 13 Hansard (9 December) . . Page.. 4068 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

that sort of process and to trial that possibility for greater input from the community and other members of the Assembly. I remember that this was supported by ACTCOSS at the time, too. ACTCOSS was making a similar call. What the Greens were saying was quite different from what we have here.

Mr Humphries tells me that this motion came out of the committee. Perhaps for that reason the Government in this instance is going to support the committee, but that is not a consistent rationale from the Government. They do not support things just because they have members on committees. I am interested in how members of committees are backing away from recommendations they have signed onto in some instances in this place this week. I do not know how Mr Osborne is going to vote on this motion, but he may be using the argument that because he was on the committee he will support this. This was a recommendation of the committee, but I was not on that committee. If I had been on that committee I would not have supported this, for the reasons that I am giving now.

Paragraph (1) of Mr Humphries' motion says:

So, not only are we having this work imposed on the committee system, which I object to in principle for the reasons I have explained, but we also are being told what sorts of recommendations we can make as a committee. I have worked on committees in this place. They are independent bodies. They are creatures of the Assembly, but they are independent groupings who can work together cooperatively, and that often is the case in terms of how things work here. It is a good aspect of how we work in the Assembly. As a group we come up with recommendations that are the result of that work.

When you are looking at a budget proposal for a particular area, there are all sorts of things that you might choose to make comments on. You might choose to make a comment on presentation, or you might choose to make a comment on broader social environmental implications of expenditure, or something like that; but it appears that we are only going to be able to make recommendations that maintain or improve the operating result. In other words, the Government has given us their agenda for this portfolio area and they are telling us that we can spend a lot of time looking at their agenda, but we can only make recommendations that basically agree with it or improve it.

Mr Humphries: No, that is not true.

MS TUCKER: Okay, so Mr Humphries says that is not true. The motion says, "make recommendations that maintain or improve the operating result". I guess Mr Humphries is arguing that we cannot make recommendations that will say we need to change the operating result. That is the fundamental problem with not being allowed to look at the global budget. Say my committee works on this particular appropriation and we talk to

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