Page 2698 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 2013
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I made an interjection, in respect of which I was rightly told to be quiet by the Speaker, when Mr Rattenbury was saying that there were no issues arising from the estimates committee that showed the two-two situation had not produced a result. Mr Smyth raised the point yesterday. Obviously, Mr Rattenbury was not listening. Through the process, the Centre for International Economics provides a report. They then offered to provide further analysis of the budget based on issues that they had identified were significant.
That would have been very useful for this Assembly in terms of examining the budget, in terms of scrutiny of the budget, which is what the estimates committee is there for. Issues that were identified and nominated were risk issues associated with capital metro, the ACT’s debt position and the public sector workforce. They were three of the options. We could have had the Centre for International Economics inquire into one or more of those. Two members of that committee, that being myself and Mr Smyth, thought that would be a good idea for this external organisation that had been appointed by the committee to do further inquiry to examine the budget. The members of the government objected to that.
So we had a very clear example, Mr Rattenbury, that you failed to listen to yesterday where within the estimates committee an opportunity arose for an external agency that was expert, that had already been agreed to by the committee—quite clearly an organisation that had the committee’s support—to do further examination of this budget, to provide further information for this Assembly on the budget, which is the purpose of the estimates committee. The Labor members said no, without any explanation obviously other than that they did not want any more examination of this budget.
The Chief Minister also criticised my role on committees. I would like to go to the importance of the way committees are conducted. She raised the issue of the PAC committee last year that inquired into what had happened at the ED. I would remind the Chief Minister that the senior executive who doctored the information did so after having recently returned from a holiday with the minister. That was information that the Chief Minister did not provide to the Assembly and did not provide to the Auditor-General. It only became apparent through the questioning in the PAC committee. I think that that was relevant information. I do not think anyone would argue that that was relevant information that should have been provided by the Chief Minister and it was not. It was only uncovered by the work of the committee.
I would also remind members that under this government a privileges committee found that a Health executive was distributing material about how to avoid opposition questioning in estimates. I invite you to go to the privileges report of that inquiry where a Health official distributed a memo amongst all the senior Health officials that said, “This is how to avoid questioning from the opposition.” Not one of those senior Health officials sought to say, “Hey, there is a problem here.” They all just accepted it.
We have evidence that under this government—this was found in a report of the privileges committee of this Assembly—within Health, officials would deliberately try to avoid answering questions from the opposition during estimates. I think that it is
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