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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 5 Hansard (3 May) . . Page.. 1421 ..

MR QUINLAN (continuing):

In the hearings on this matter there was some discussion as to whether the government was required by the Financial Management Act to include only the old forward estimates. I have had a look at the Financial Management Act. I do not know that I accept that yet, but I am not a lawyer. I do know that there was still a possibility, a very manageable possibility, for that information to be provided along with this document, whether or not you still had to put the old numbers in because of some interpretation, I think cockeyed, of the Financial Management Act. I advise the Assembly that I do intend very shortly to bring forward legislation in this place that will require a government that brings down a supplementary appropriation to bring down with it the latest forward estimates so that future supplementary appropriations can be viewed in their context and their implication for outyears can be seen and evaluated along with evaluating the particular line items in it.

Like the budget that we have on the table, pretty well all of the things in this appropriation do look like reasonable expenditures in themselves. There is not evidence or communication of a structured approach or a priority-setting approach to it. It seemed to be: "How do we get this $43 million spent and how do we get a fairly low surplus for the current financial year so that there will be no funds around in an election year?" For presentation it is disappointing, but we will be doing something about that.

I have in this place earlier discussed the report of the public accounts committee on this appropriation paper and I have also alluded to my dissenting report from the other report that I signed, so I will gloss over lightly some of the specifics of this appropriation. Consistent with my concerns about forward estimates in this paper, I have expressed concerns about the information content of monthly financial reports coming to this place that might otherwise have been used to give context to this paper. They are pretty well useless. I do not know of any Assembly members actually reading them. I have never heard any questions arise out of them. I think we all look at the bottom lines and the bottom lines are all quite out of context with the probable final bottom line, but nobody has worried about them to date.

Again, I advise the Assembly that I will be bringing forward legislation to reduce the reporting periods to quarters rather than monthly, but I have been assured by bureaucrats that it would be possible, once that is done, to have comprehensive quarterly financial reports come to this place which include balance day adjustments and include accounting for timing differences of expenditures and revenues, and we will have reasonable estimates of where we are at and where we are likely to finish in a given financial year. I expect from that that the four reports will have technically a far greater information content than do the 12 reports that we get at the moment. In the context of just that point that I am making, I do recommend the Auditor's report for last year's financial statements. Part of his introduction to that report, that is last year's financial statements, talks about the need for statements like this and financial statements to be brought down surrounded by general discussion so that they become meaningful and useful.

There is within this bill a couple of things that are little shockers. I will go to the perennial of the Bruce Stadium. A couple of people have groaned when I have mentioned Bruce Stadium in recent times as an issue on the ground. Let me say that anybody who expects me to talk about the ACT economy and financial management between now and the election and not mention Bruce Stadium has to be kidding himself.

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