Page 1199 - Week 04 - Thursday, 4 May 2006

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facilitate scrutiny of the budget. She was there to protect ministers. She had her marching orders, as did all the other government backbenchers, and we saw that played out.

One thing we had from Ms MacDonald in her speech today which was quite humorous is that she is still going on about the fact that we would not tell her that we were going to do a dissenting report. The fact is that we did not know whether we would have to do a dissenting report. We did not know what was going to be in the report. How was I to know what the committee was going to decide? I did not know until it was finalised.

I could have told you at the beginning that I would be doing a dissenting report and we could have all gone away and not had the committee hearings. It would have been just as productive. The fact is that we looked at scrutinising the budget. We were the ones who were doing that. We asked hard questions. You said that we argued line by line. We should have just allowed you to write something and we could have added a couple of comments at the end. Yes, we argued. Yes, we argued hard. We put forward lots of propositions. Some got in there. They were not in the dissenting report. The ones that did not get into the main report were put by us in our very comprehensive—as you say, 80-page—dissenting report. The most embarrassing thing for Ms MacDonald is the fact that our dissenting report was much more impressive than the report that she oversaw.

That is what hurts. What hurts Ms MacDonald is the fact that we put together in a short amount of time and without secretariat support a report which was a good report and which held the government to account. Despite Ms MacDonald’s efforts and despite the stacking of the committee to an extent, at least we had something come out of that process. The fact that we did not have a government majority meant that we were able to get some things in the report that maybe were a little bit critical of the government.

That is not going to happen this time because nothing will get up, as there will be three government members to vote against anything that might be critical of the budget or that might be critical of the government. I look forward to being proved wrong in that and seeing the three government members being harsh and critical of the government, actually scrutinising it and actually holding the government to account, but I will not be holding my breath.

Question put:

That Mr Corbell’s amendment be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the affirmative.

Amendment agreed to.

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