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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 10 Hansard (18 October) . . Page.. 3177 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Two months is not a long period, Mr Speaker, but it reflects the sort of consideration time which is available to the government itself. The government will have to determine these sorts of priorities by December in order to prepare papers and documents for presentation to Assembly committees by early in the new calendar year. Although members might wish that there was longer, we have the sad reality that a budget has to be presented in respect of each financial year.

Each financial year is approximately 365 days long and we only have those 365 days in which to prepare a budget, bring it down and have it passed, lest we start to cut into the time provided in other financial years for the same budgetary process. I urge this motion on members. I hope that members will accept that it is an important evolution in the process of improving budget accountability to the community of the ACT and that there will be support for this motion for that reason.

MR QUINLAN (11.42): I must say that I do recall the now Chief Minister calling the last draft budget process something of a failure and something of a success between then and now, depending on what he wanted to put forward. This proposal, on the face of it, sounds pretty good. It sounds like open government and sounds like participatory government. But let me say that it is probably the most transparent piece of political manoeuvring that you could bring to this place.

I presume that it has something to do with Mr Humphries' desire for a honeymoon period. Going back a year, we had a draft budget that was brought down towards the end of January or early February, the main elements of it having been leaked over January and the maximum political advantage milked from them, and then there was the challenge for members to put up their ideas-the old put-up or shut-up type of process-which was, I guess, a way for the government to traverse the estimates process.

The government did not like the estimates process and would not have that, so it decided that we had better have an inverse estimates process: "You give us your budget proposals and we will have the last say upon them and maybe some good ideas will come forward." I am sure that there was some constructive discussion last year. But the system last year was really corrupted. The corruption of the system started when the leaks started coming out before Christmas, I think, and then we received a draft budget. It was a draft budget, I have to say, that at the end of the day did not look a whole lot like the budget we finished up with.

Mr Humphries: You said that it would be identical when we presented it.

MR QUINLAN: The draft budget?

Mr Humphries: Yes, you complained that it would be the same as the budget brought down in May.

MR QUINLAN: No, I said that your draft budget was a repeat of your forward estimates of the previous year and you had done no work on them and invented social capital later. In fact, what you wanted to do was take the best thoughts of the brighter people in this place, embroider them into your budget and then do what you please over the top of that.

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