Page 2063 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video


in Adelaide. I am sure there will be a place for you in Canberra any time you choose to come back.

Let me finish by thanking my staff, Haidee and Tim, for putting up with me for the last month, six weeks, as we are immersed in this process. But in particular, to close, the best and most worthy thanks go to Grace Concannon, who engineered the process. Grace, thank you very much for all your efforts. I commend the report to the house.

MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (11.51): I take this opportunity to provide some comments on the Select Committee on Estimates report on the Appropriation Bill 2011-2012. As Mr Smyth pointed out, it is probably a record for an estimates report. Certainly, I think it is the first time that we have had to go to this ring-bound arrangement. I would very much like to acknowledge and thank the secretariat for their extraordinary efforts in producing this report.

Some important issues are raised in this report. There are some important recommendations that have been made in the report. I will go to those in a minute. First, I would like to raise a bit of an issue I have with the size of the report. It seems that we are moving in the direction of larger and larger reports with more and more recommendations. I think we need to have a bit of a stocktake about where that might be going.

I know that last year, having been on the estimates committee, we did have a conversation about the increasing workload and the impact on the secretariat. I think we need to be extremely mindful that this is a very intense period of work in a very short time. That does have a considerable impact on a very small team of dedicated and professional people. I think that we need to keep that in mind and be cognisant of that in future estimates reports.

One of the things I also note is that we have here the discussion and the recommendations, but of course at the back there is the full list of questions taken on notice and questions on notice. This year we have got up to 894 questions on notice and questions taken on notice. I also think that would be quite a record. Of course, all of that does need to be managed through the Committee Office. I would particularly like to acknowledge Lydia and the role that she plays in tracking those and ensuring that they are sent out and come back again. It is an enormous task and I think that we need to be aware of that impact and look at how we might be able to have a greater focus or streamline the estimates work.

As Mr Smyth said, there were a number of recommendations and sections. One of them, obviously, was around the office building. A considerable amount of money is being allocated to the government office building, or GOB, and it had about 20 recommendations in this report. That was because we did have ministers coming in to talk about the reports that had already been undertaken. We also heard from the consultants, which was a very useful exercise, I believe. I would like to thank those consultants who came in to appear before the estimates committee. It was useful. But, of course, with many of these exercises, it sometimes can lead to even further questions to be asked.


Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video