Page 5598 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 9 December 2009
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The government will continue to provide accurate, relevant, timely and useful information on the state of the territory’s finances through a regular reporting regime. Let me remind those opposite that it was the government that introduced a package of financial reporting amendments, the FMA, back in 2003. Those amendments have resulted in the territory having a strong and cohesive financial framework. Those amendments were about ensuring updated budget estimates and forecasts are provided by a certain date each year. Those amendments did not call the budget review a midyear review, nor did they require that the budget review be based on a certain time period of data.
Today’s financial framework allows the Assembly and the community to scrutinise the territory’s financial operations and performance by ensuring that relevant information is updated at appropriate intervals. We oppose this bill today on the basis that it limits the government’s flexibility to report to the Assembly on the territory’s budgetary position at a time when it is most appropriate to what is happening in the broader context of the budget and the economy.
We are particularly mindful that sometimes events occur that require us to be flexible on when we provide updates to our budget estimates and our economic parameters. This is why we provided an update to the budget shortly after the presentation of the commonwealth’s budget this financial year as the changes to our GST revenue and the update to the economic parameters provided by the commonwealth were such that we thought it was the right approach for transparency reasons.
It is this flexibility that allowed us to undertake a midyear review in December 2008 as we watched the uncertainty that was being created by the global financial crisis and a significant and rapid deterioration in world economies and global financial markets. We thought it was timely to update our estimates based on the significantly changed environment and to provide this information in a timely way to the Canberra community. I am sure many of us in this place would recall the anxiety experienced globally, nationally and locally about what the actual impacts of the global financial crisis would be on a jurisdiction’s economy and public finance.
When I became Treasurer, I was inundated with questions from the media, community and indeed those on the opposition side on what the state of the territory’s finances were. They wanted to know what the impact was on the territory and how would the government respond. I, very early in my treasury days, committed to engage the community in a time of unprecedented turmoil on the state of our finances and the outlook for the local economy. I think, on reflection, it was the right thing to do and the responsible thing to do and it was done through the budget review process.
Fortunately, the Financial Management Act provided the government with enough flexibility to publish the midyear review in late December. The legislation afforded us an opportunity to inform the Assembly and the community of what the impacts of the GFC were. We consider that this flexibility allows us to provide information that is relevant at a particular point in time. Mr Smyth’s bill actually reduces the flexibility which allows us to respond to changing economic circumstances and to provide relevant information to the community on the state of the territory’s finances at an appropriate point in time.
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