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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (11 May) . . Page.. 1440 ..

MS TUCKER (11.42): I move:

MR KAINE (11.43): I am speaking to the motion, not the amendment. I can understand the reluctance of the Treasurer to have his budget subjected to yet further examination, but there is little justification for him to take the view that it should not be.

First of all, the experiment this year of having it examined by the various standing committees of the Assembly has proved to be a failure. Even the Treasurer himself has acknowledged, at least privately, that this was an experiment that will not be repeated next year. So if we let it stand at that and accept erroneously that the budget has been adequately subjected to scrutiny by this place, we would be dead wrong, and I think the minister must accept that.

The second point about the proposition that it should not be subjected to review by an estimates committee is the fact that the budget as presented in a couple of weeks time will probably not be exactly the same as the draft budget that was put to the Assembly committees. The minister has indicated that even the parameters on which the budget was prepared could change from the time that the draft budget was prepared until the time the final budget is prepared. So we do not know yet what the final budget is going to look like. For the Treasurer to assert that somehow it is illegitimate or unnecessary for this legislature to scrutinise his final budget when he brings it down is almost bizarre in the concept of executive responsibility and the responsibility of the Treasurer to the legislature.

There seems to be a feeling amongst the members of this executive that the executive is somehow above accountability to the legislature. We only have to look at the performance of this government over the last three to five years. There seems to be a clear view on the part of the executive that it is not accountable to this place. It seems to me that the Treasurer, yet again, is expressing that same view in this particular instance.

I for one will not support the notion that the executive should become less accountable. Nor will I accept a series of attempts by this government, made over a period of years, to fudge the lines between the executive and the legislature. Our Chief Minister, in particular, does not seem to know the difference between being a member of an executive and being a member of the legislature. Nor does she seem to understand the difference between being a member of the executive and being a public sector manager. She seems to think that she is all three.

Some of that seems to be rubbing off on Mr Humphries, and we have seen several attempts to water down the traditional and conventional relationships between the legislature, the executive and the administration. One of those examples, of course, was the attempt to set up so-called executive committees, which were neither one thing nor the other. They would have been accountable only to the Chief Minister and not to this legislature in any way. They would have been creatures of the Chief Minister with no

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