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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 221 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

This meant that it was rather a hollow exercise in terms of what the real budget and what the government's real intentions were, but it still made noises about there being an open consultative process. In fact, at that stage, early in the piece, the Treasurer was saying, "What we are doing is allowing the people to consult through the committees," which means, "Do not bring the unwashed to me. I will divert them to the committees and they can do the interaction."

Then we pointed out, quite logically, that that system does not actually work because we know that, with the best will in the world, committees cannot relay precisely what community groups have said without some of the Chinese whispers-type impact on what is said and our own political standpoints, where we would quite obviously interpret what has been said. We would possibly hear selectively, even if we were not trying to do that.

So last year's effort was a bit of a sham, but what it did do for the government was that it allowed the government to claim that we have a consultative process, when it was actually moving in the opposite direction. It also condensed the time that the Assembly had to run the estimates process. That is what the government does not like. This does not like the actual scrutiny of what it is really doing, so it has to try to invent methods of keeping committees occupied, saying, "Put up or shut up" because it does not want an exposed examination of what it is doing.

This year we had an extra overlay with the budget parameters select committee, which did a fairly creditable job with what it had to work with. Nevertheless, there is another phase and there is another consumption of time in the scrutiny of government process. This year, with the hypocrisy of putting out budget leaks before the draft budget came forward and went through that so-called consultation and review by committees, that has intensified.

The process was not quite so ordered this year, of course, because we had a productivity commission report, which meant that there was another crack-a very large crack-in relation to education to paper over promptly. It was a bit less orderly, but nevertheless the same negative hygiene process was in place where the government was just trying to cover bases.

Now we have reached the stage where the government has enough information to go public on a wad of press releases about initiatives and reinvesting in the Canberra community-again, the scattergun approach. Also, we have seen in this approach an increase in the practice the government employed last year of bulking up expenditure, so now the government does its forward estimates and says, "We will call that line in the budget a program, tot it all up, and say we are going to spend $10 million this year, but we are going to spend $50 million overall," and the government announces a $50 million program.

I have just had a quick glance at the documentation because we have not had it long, but I get the impression-and I think it is pretty right-that the most commonly used phrase in this set of press releases from the government is "over four years". This is not the draft budget; this is, again, the whole scattergun approach, garnished with the bulking-up approach to again paper over as many cracks as is possible.

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