2002-09-19
Madam Speaker Braham took the Chair at 7.15 pm.
Mr MALEY (Goyder): Madam Speaker, I present a petition from 2065 petitioners praying that the 24-hour Medical assessment service be retained, and a 24-hour chemist facility be established for the Palmerston and rural area. The petition bears the Clerk’s certificate that it conforms with the requirements of standing orders. I move that the petition be read.
Motion agreed to; petition read:
service, allowing Palmerston and rural residents personal access to medical advice from
nurses, paramedics and registered general practitioners, or the ability to be transported
by ambulance to Royal Darwin Accident & Emergency;
2. To establish, within the Farrar Medical Facility, a 24-hour chemist facility as further support
to the 24-hour medical assessment service.
Mr STIRLING (Leader of Government Business): Madam Speaker, I move that leave of absence be granted to the member for Arafura, Ms Scrymgour, this day, on account of ill health.
Motion agreed to.
Mr REED (Katherine): Madam Speaker, I seek leave of absence for the Leader of the Opposition who has gone to Sydney to meet with the Prime Minister.
Motion agreed to.
Madam SPEAKER: Honourable members, pursuant to the resolutions of the Assembly dated 20 August 2002 and 17 September 2002, the Committee of the Whole will now consider the report of the Estimates Committee and the Appropriation Bill 2002-03.
In committee:
Mr CHAIRMAN: Order! I call on the Chairman of the Estimates Committee to present the report of the committee.
Dr BURNS: Mr Chairman, I have pleasure in tabling the report of the Estimates Committee on its consideration of the estimates of proposed expenditure contained in the schedule to the Appropriation Bill 2002-03, together with the answers to questions on notice, and additional information provided to date to the committee. I advise honourable members that further additional information and answers to questions on notice will be tabled on 8 October 2002, and that the edited Hansard report of the committee’s proceedings will contain written questions and answers.
I would like to make a few brief comments and, as honourable members can tell, I am a little hoarse. I have a cold and, like others involved in the committee, I am a little tired. But I am tired and happy, because it is completed - I believe it is completed.
Members: Hear, hear!
Dr BURNS: This was a historic committee, and it was the first meeting of an Estimates Committee within the Northern Territory parliamentary structure. I was very proud to be chairman of that and, although I know others have reservations, when they look back they will be proud to have been part of this. It is an ongoing development; that is the way I see it.
There has been a lot of criticism and, no doubt, we will hear criticism of the process. Underneath all of this, I guess, has been a review of the process that has been foreshadowed, and, as a party and as a government, we are committed to improving. We set the bar high, and we will continue to look at ways in which we can improve the performance of this parliament. The many changes we have seen over the last year bear very strong testimony to that.
I do not want to get into a slanging match. I know there are going to be allegations that there was not enough time. We have been through this, in terms of the Committee of the Whole in previous years, that the average was under 30 hours. I have not counted up the hours but, at the end, it was substantially more than 30 hours that we went through this process. There was actually more time and, on a number of occasions, I allowed proceedings to go on because of breaks and various things. I tried to be as generous and as fair as I could, as a chairman of this committee. I do not want to go into the allegations of squandering time; those have been played out. We could have used our time a lot more efficiently. No doubt, the Chief Minister was on the stand giving evidence for 14 hours. At the end of the day, some would say that we ran out of time. I would contend that we probably should have evened out the time for each minister, and there would probably have been adequate time for each minister.
I felt that a lot of time was taken up within the process with members - I guess from both sides - coming to grips with accrual accounting; it is a difficult concept. We had to go through the differences between the accrual and the cash, and that took up a lot of time. I am particularly indebted to the Under Treasurer, Ms Jennifer Prince, and other officers of Treasury, making themselves available and stepping us through, in an authoritative way, accrual accounting. I know that we have a lot more to do with accrual accounting. It is going to take several years for us to bed accrual accounting down. We need to identify the assets, and I heard some very interesting evidence or information given about how far we have to go in identifying what are some unique assets in some pretty remote areas of the Northern Territory. So, that is an important issue.
I feel that we got sidetracked at times, and there was a lack of coordination on the opposition side. That was evident today when the Leader of the Opposition wanted to move on, but other members - as is their right, I am not impugning them at all - wanted to ask questions about their individual electorates. I sensed a bit of a disjunction - how is that for a word? - or a lack of agreement about how they were to proceed. There needs to be a little coordination there.
We attempted, as a government, to facilitate the process by tabling all the written answers to questions. I know there were a few answers and some tables to some of the answers missing, but it was an act on our part to try and facilitate the process. It did help the process, I believe, on the last day. That is probably something we have to look at: about the written questions, verbal questions and supplementaries. I am all for a fulsome review of the process.
To finish off, Mr Chairman, I would like to thank the team who assisted the committee - I know there has been talk of paucity of resources - particularly Terry Hanley and Ros Vogeli. They put in many, many hours, and many early mornings and weekends over the last few weeks. I know it has been a bit of a nightmare for Terry and Ros, and there have been numbers everywhere - maybe they had not ordered them the way that some members would have liked but, in all honesty, they tried to do the best job that they could, with a new process and a literal avalanche of material to deal with.
As always, I’d like to thank Hansard staff. I always think they do a fantastic job. They did spell SEEK correctly, which was a pretty good achievement.
Ms Martin: Spell what?
Dr BURNS: SEEK. That is an in-joke for the committee, you see. I thank not only Hansard staff, but all the officers throughout the department. I particularly appreciated the way in which the member for Katherine and Deputy Leader of the Opposition came in at the end of the process and very graciously, I suppose, did that. I was intent on getting the report together and getting back to parliament, but I thank the member for Katherine for his great words of thanks to officers of all departments for the way that they have worked very hard to support the process. I particularly appreciated the way in which officers, as they sat at the table with ministers, when they were given the opportunity, tried to honestly answer questions and give information. Yes, I am sure there are negatives, and I am sure they are going to be highlighted here tonight, but there were also positives. With that mixture of positives and negatives, thank you for the opportunity to chair this committee. I thank all members of the committee, particularly the core members. We all put in; we all stayed there during many long hours. The other members who came in and out and asked the questions, thank you very much, and that is all from me.
Mr Reed: Give the report.
Dr BURNS: Oh, sorry. Here is the report, and I believe there is also a dissenting report as well, Mr Chairman.
Mr CHAIRMAN: Honourable members, pursuant to the resolution of the Assembly dated 20 August 2002, the committee has before it the Appropriation Bill 2002-03, and the report of the Estimates Committee which shall be considered in the following manner: the question is that the proposed expenditure be agreed to and that the resolution, or expressions of opinion as agreed to by the committee in relation to the proposed expenditure, or outputs, be noted.
I remind honourable members that the speech time limits for this debate are as follows: ministers, leaders of the opposition and shadow ministers, 20 minutes; any other members, 10 minutes. Further, the resolution provides for a maximum period of five hours for the conduct of the debate. Accordingly, as the time is now 7 30 pm, if the debate is not concluded before 12.30 am, I will then put the question.
When the consideration of the bill and the report have been concluded and the question put, the following questions will be put forthwith without debate ‘That the remainder of the bill be agreed to’. The bill will then be reported to the Assembly.
Mr REED: Mr Chairman, I do not intend to dwell too much on the actual process. In terms of this historic occasion, it was historic in that it was the first time that this House has participated in an Estimates Committee. That was the desire of this government; they put it in place. We have just spent the last three days going through that process. It is now timely for us to consider, if this process is to continue, how we might improve it rather than dwell too much on what some of the issues were. However, I want to touch on a couple.
First of all, in terms of the time constraint, the government was advised that 30 hours would not be enough and we did - and I say ‘we’ collectively in terms of the opposition and you, Mr Chairman - work hard to try to have that time extended, bearing in mind that we were to embark on a new process and were not aware of just how that would flow, and that there were some other important factors that had to be taken into account that were not. For example, in the past, the opposition numbers have been in the order of six or seven and, as a consequence of that, question numbers were not necessarily as high nor the supplementary questions …
Mr Stirling: Big statement. There were more. In 1999, you told us there were 3000 questions.
Mr REED: It is a historical fact that there are only three or four real workers in the six or seven at any given time.
In addition to that, of course, Mr Chairman, on this occasion there was the circumstance that we had you, as an Independent, who worked hard and put forward a lot of questions. Also, in addition to a minister providing the answers, there was a minister and at least one officer and, on some occasions, several officers who necessarily took up time in providing the answers. For example, in the short time that was allocated to the minister for Health this evening, she took some 12 minutes consulting officers herself, and that was without any contribution to the debate. Having heard the question, she then spoke to her officers for 12 minutes, which is time lost to the productive contribution to the debate.
All of those issues now have to be taken into account when we consider how the process can be changed to make sure that it will work effectively into the future. The government has undertaken to conduct a review of this, and I hope that the Chief Minister is serious in that intent. I would suggest, Mr Chairman, rather than the review being handed to the Public Accounts Committee, it could perhaps be made more holistic and a committee formed that might comprise the Chief Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, yourself as an Independent member, and perhaps the Speaker, so that there is a level of independence that is injected - and I speak not of you as an independent but the Speaker - into the formulation of the structure of future committees, and that the principal stakeholders are also represented on such a committee. It is but one suggestion as to how a review could be undertaken and I ask members of the House to consider it. Because if it is simply goes off to the Public Accounts Committee, we will have the policemen checking on the policemen, so to speak, in terms of the committee itself and how it should be structured. Perhaps it could be useful if we look a little more broadly at what would be an effective committee to determine the structure of the Estimates Committee and how it will operate into the future.
It is regrettable that, because of the lack of time, a substantial part of Health and some $172m of the Infrastructure, Planning and Environment were not debated at all. I dare say that is historic. I have done a bit of a search to try and find, in the Westminster system, parliaments that have passed the budget without full and thorough scrutiny of the budget through minister by minister, and I have not been able to find one. It is a most unusual circumstance. It is a very sad circumstance, and it does reflect on this House. The government can stand by the amount of time that it set aside and be rigid, but the fact is we are all going to wake up in Darwin tomorrow, God willing. We will be here and would have been able to again present ourselves tomorrow to continue the debate and to be able, on behalf of those people who we represent in this Chamber - we do not represent ourselves our parties here, it is much bigger than that; we represent the people of the Northern Territory. The people of the Northern Territory deserve to be sure in the knowledge that full scrutiny is applied to the budget
It is the most important legislation that passes through this House on an annual basis. It formulates the direction of the Northern Territory. It is not the government’s legislation; it is the people’s legislation, and it is the people’s money that the government is spending. It does the government little good to say: ‘You wasted time’. I take up the example of: ‘Well, you spent four hours …’ or whatever ‘… on a couple of million dollars appropriation to the Auditor-General or the Ombudsman’. Well, so what? The fact is that we were seeking answers to questions that we considered to be important. The basis of the Westminster system is the ability of respective members of this House to be able, on behalf of their constituents and Territorians collectively, to ask what questions these members, individually, consider appropriate in their undertaking of the scrutiny of the budget.
If that offends the government – we are not here to ask questions of the government that they like or that they will be happy with. We are here to scrutinise the budget to the best ability of individual members and, in the case of the opposition, the CLP members of this parliament. That happens to be a fundamental foundation of democracy and, if this parliament is going to start to slip away from those principles and traditions, then were in a sad state of affairs.
So, I hope that the Chief Minister will seriously consider means by which we can effectively re-assess the Estimates Committee process, and make sure that next year we - albeit using what we have done this week as the model, the base structure - improve it to the extent that it will work, and that it will work effectively and will give, without any concern to individual members, a full opportunity for them to ask the questions that they consider appropriate, and to afford them an opportunity to get good answers from them.
My calculations on the public sessions that we have just been through are that, in fact, it did not take 30 hours of questioning. There were 28 hours and 18 minutes, once you exclude meal breaks, mini-breaks and when committee when into deliberative session. Of course, that does not take into account how much time disappeared with the consultations between ministers and advisors. As I say, that took some 11 or 12 minutes with the minister for Health. I do not criticise the minister for health for consulting with her advisors; that is an appropriate thing for her to do. But, it is simply another consideration that we have to take into account: that it is something that must be done, so if it has to be done, we have to make allowance for it in the global times that are set for the committee to sit, and for it to be able to work effectively. If we do not do that, we are all going to be left wanting in terms of the process that we will put in place next year.
As far as the members of the opposition are concerned, with the work that they undertook, it was a very thorough process with many questions. We dedicated over a week to formulating the questions. The government set the date and time by which questions should lodged. We had every question lodged an hour before the deadline that was set. We did that, mindful of the fact that, if we are going to put in place a process, then we should give it every chance of succeeding; and we gave that our best shot. In terms of meeting that first deadline, we did it. We had in mind also, of course, that once we passed those questions on to the secretary of the committee, he and his staff had a lot of work to do in getting them on to agencies; and the agencies had to find the answers to the questions and get them back to the committee secretariat for us then to be able to deliberate on them.
There, also, is a very important consideration that we have to take into account when looking at the structure of the next committee. Let us not just look at how it impacts on us as members of parliament and the activity that we undertake to make it work, but let us look at the impact that it has on the secretariat, and also the public servants, who have to work hard to provide us with the base information and the logistics to be able to pursue the process; because, if we ignore them, then the committee process itself is not going to work. We should expand our vision of the Estimates Committee process to include the whole process: from the opposition’s - and you, as an Independent, Mr Chairman - point of view in getting the questions ready; track that through the secretariat; through the respective government agencies and the ministers; and then into the committee process itself. If we do not do that, it will be a system that is again doomed to fail.
I hope that the government does not rigidly stick to the 30 hour rule In fairness to them, in approaching the establishment of this first Estimates Committee, they set a time limit. I hope though that, in setting that time limit, they are gracious enough, if you like, or have sufficient understanding that more time is needed because of the process. Whilst, in determining that 30 hours, they struck an average, we did indicate that an average was not appropriate. Whilst 30 hours might have been considered to be appropriate, we pointed out on a number of occasions that, on at least two years - 1996 and 1997 - the debate that occurred in this House under the former regime ran for over 41 hours. That should have been an indication to the government that 30 hours would not have been enough. But they made a decision, and they have stuck by it. I hope that they are now big and hairy enough to be able to appreciate that more time will be needed in the future to provide full and open scrutiny of the budget, if we are going to effectively represent the people of the Northern Territory. That is a point that is salient to the whole issue.
In terms of other aspects of the issues beyond shadow spokespersons, or shadow ministers’ responsibilities, the other thing that suffered today - perhaps with the exception of yourself to some extent, Mr Chairman - was the ability for members of parliament beyond their responsibilities as opposition spokesman for various portfolios, to be able to pursue issues on their electorates. There were very few of those issues that were able to be pursued effectively. Some were, in a very scant way, over the last few days, but members, by and large, have not had a big opportunity to be able to ask questions that relate to their electorates and their constituents. That is a huge shortcoming in what this process has been about and what it should be about. That is another factor that we should take into account.
Also whilst access was provided for reporting by the media, it seems to me that the venue that the Estimates Committee was held in was inadequate from the media’s and, certainly, our own point of view. The room is too small. With regard to the media, it might be more appropriate next year to consider providing them with perhaps on-line computers where they can work and be able to prepare their reports. Given that many of them did sit there for hours themselves, if we are going to have effective reporting by the media of the Estimates Committee process, then we should do what we can to facilitate that. That is another aspect of where the media have to be better catered for.
Regarding the venue, I do not know what you would do in terms of another venue, apart from using this Chamber in a restructured way, which would be rather an onerous task. However, I do not think that room was appropriate. It was appropriate for this occasion in the first year, but to go back into that venue and try and make it work, is difficult. There are constraints on the space that is available, in terms of table space for documents - necessarily, we all have a lot of documents - and there are constraints and difficulties in the public access. I spoke to a number of people who came along to have a look and, whilst many did come in and sit down and have a look, many just felt confronted. They had to walk through the door and there were all these people sitting there and, if it was not confrontational, they certainly felt that they were imposing on the proceedings. We should be encouraging more people to come along and making it easier for them to do so. If we cannot facilitate that, well, what is the use of this process? That is a very important consideration and it expands on that horizon that I was talking about earlier: let us look much more broadly than our tunnel vision of what the Estimates Committee is - sitting in a room and asking questions of the government. Let us look at both sides of the lead-in and the lead-out in how it should be organised, and undertake a full assessment of the people who have to access the venue - be they ministerial advisers, members of the public, the media or, of course, agency representatives and officers - because it all adds up in the end to the effectiveness of the process.
I take this opportunity in closing, to again thank the secretariat and the members of the PAC. They were on uncharted waters, so to speak, in going into this process. Generally speaking, it went as well as could be expected. The Chairman of the committee, Dr Burns, in overall terms conducted the proceedings as best as you could expect on a first-off basis, and I thank him for his forbearance and cooperation on a number of occasions. I also thank Mr Hanley in the secretariat, and the Hansard staff who will be working for a long time after we have stopped talking about this to finalise all the reports and to provide us with the Hansards and the longer-term records to which we will be able to refer. The officers of departments and ministers and ministerial staff, I thank for their assistance. I hope that, in overall terms, the government is big enough to recognise some of the shortcomings, to put aside the expressions of concern and any nastiness that they may have in relation to a view that too much time was taken, and just appreciate the fact that it is a democratic process and the opposition is charged with the responsibility to scrutinise the budget.
That is what we did. Perhaps even starting with a little time last Monday or not having lost the two hours on Tuesday morning, and going a bit later tonight or into tomorrow, this whole process could have been completed and we would have been able to do it without much of an extension of time. We would have been able to have a much better outcome. However, on the bright side, let us take into consideration all of the issues that I have raised. I hope that the government will do it in an understanding and a productive way, so that the process that we put in place next year will work the way that we all want it to.
Members: Hear, hear.
Ms MARTIN: Mr Chairman, I am slightly taken aback, I think, by the speech by the Deputy Opposition Leader. It was a very gracious speech tonight and one that looked constructively at the process that we have had, and I thank him for his constructive remarks on that. He balanced criticism of what the process was, with some ideas about how we might move forward. We have always said that this is the first go at having an Estimates Committee in the Territory and we certainly would like to look at the experiences that we have had over the last three days and how we make it more effective, and certainly more constructive, in the future.
But I cannot let what the Deputy Opposition Leader has said go by without making a few comments about some of the rewriting of what went on during those three days in Estimates Committee, compared with what really did go on. We set up a process that matched the hours that we had had in the Committee of the Whole in appropriations previously. As one who had been through it six times in that way, I matched, as we went through this process in estimates, with what we used to do in opposition. We always came in with a strategy and a focus of what the attention was we wanted to give to the budget, and where our priorities were. One of the things that we always believed and took as a fundamental when we came to the committee stage of appropriations debates, was that the budget books that we were dealing with, that government, year after year, brought down in the past, were the starting point.
We gave that work that was done by Treasury credibility. We said: ‘We are accepting that these are the numbers done to the best of ability’. That might mean you might find the odd typo, but we believed those budget books. We had arguments, discussions or questions in here based on the fact of what those allocations were; whether we agreed with the priorities, the dollars that were matching those priorities. On the whole, we had very constructive debates. Sometimes they got terse, and sometimes ministers and opposition members got very tired. But, there was a bottom line in what we discussed and that was that we trusted Treasury to produce the figures, according to direction by government of where money was spent, according to priorities, and according to outcomes.
What shocked me, as we went through those three days of estimates, and as I spent my 14 hours - or whatever it was - in front of the committee, was that we were not discussing priorities or outcomes for Territorians. What we were trying to defend - or what I was trying to defend, as Chief Minister and Treasurer, and what I was being attacked about - was whether this document had any credibility at all. It was as though we could not discuss anything about where funding was going or what we were trying to do as government for the Territory, because the opposition would give no credibility to this document. Yet, year after year, we, as opposition, did that. As my hours ticked by and I felt that the time was being wasted, it hit me very hard that we did not have an agreed fundamental to work on; that the opposition was simply saying Treasury had produced a lie, and …
Mr DUNHAM: A point of order, Mr Chairman! I do not think transcripts will bear out anybody saying that Treasury produced a lie.
Mr CHAIRMAN: There is not a point of order in this case.
Ms MARTIN: No, I have not accused anyone of lying. This is what disturbed me about the process we were part of: unless we as a parliament can agree that the figures produced in the budget books - and I know last year was an exception - are the figures that are done to the best of the ability of the Treasury, then we have no debate to have. We have no questioning to move forward with because there is simply no common ground to work from.
It was one of the things that we recognised following last year, and it is why we put in place FITA, the Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act, so that the figures in here, signed off by the Under Treasurer, were the figures we could work from. That is what the frustration from government was with this Estimates Committee process: we did not talk about the real things to do with allocations. We had an exercise that simply went round and round and round. For 14 hours - excluding the half an hour I had in my Arts responsibilities for which I want to say to all those who did the questioning: thank you, that was constructive. We actually talked about what Arts was going to do for the next 12 months, some of the strategies we had in place, some of the funding allocations against it.
For my time dealing with the Auditor-General, who has a budget of $2m and four staff, and does an important job but does scrupulously and accountably, and yet the Auditor-General got two-and-a-half hours of round and round and round. I do not know what was achieved. We followed that with the Ombudsman - again, round and round. We then moved into my Department of the Chief Minister – again time wasting. Time wasting hour after hour after hour. Nothing about what the priorities were. There are some really exciting priorities within the Department of the Chief Minister, but I got about three minutes to talk about the initiatives we are taking with the Office of Territory Development that match in a complementary way with the Social Policy Unit which in turn works with the Community Engagement Division. We have an Indigenous Policy Unit. These are exciting initiatives about where this government is going, and you should have been testing us about the funds allocated to that, and what we are going to achieve; but it was virtually untouched. The exciting ways this government is going about business: the different ways, the whole of government ways were virtually untouched. You should have really tested us about how we were going to achieve that. But none of that - none of that direction from government was tested in an appropriate way.
To listen to the Deputy Opposition Leader come in here and make constructive comments about estimates - I appreciate those, but they cannot be in isolation from what really happened in that Estimates Committee because, for hour after hour, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by the way the questions were asked, by the aggression with which the questions were asked. People walked out and described the atmosphere as venomous. That is not the way we run this parliament: a venomous atmosphere. I was also embarrassed by the way our senior public servants were treated. That is one of the fundamentals here. We have an Estimates Committee where you have the minister and, quite properly, as in every other place, those senior public servants. And yet, it is beholden on us as parliamentarians to treat those people who work for us, and with us, with respect. If you want to quiz somebody directly: it is the minister. If you want to offer criticism: it is the minister. Yet what I found was that our senior public servants were not being treated that way; they were being criticised. On behalf of this parliament and this government, I would like to apologise to those men and women, because that behaviour was very poor on the part of the opposition. They did not deserve that. That is not what an Estimates Committee is about.
There were certainly pluses from the Estimates Committee. Having been in here for six Committees of the Whole in appropriation, it was far better. The Deputy Opposition Leader made the point there was time wasted - time wasted by consulting with senior officials and somehow or other that came off the total time. Let me just say I stood over there year after year when ministers were asked questions and, after they had finished reading out the answers, when we asked a supplementary they would run across; they would disappear. How much time was wasted there? How much time was wasted, if we are going to talk about waste?
We said, year after year: ‘Have an Estimates Committee process, because then you will have in place that is appropriate: the minister answering those broad political directions and, quite properly, the agency officials with their expertise and their in-depth knowledge of the issues, offering a second part of the answer, quite appropriately’. I thought at one stage, while I was being verbally attacked by the Deputy Opposition Leader: why should we bother having Treasury staff at all? I said to them today: ‘The shadow Treasurer thinks I should be able to answer every single question, in depth, about activity in the Treasury’. And yet, I have a couple of hundred staff who know exactly what they are doing, who are experts in their field, and I value them for that. That is why I want them there in the Estimates Committee: to give that detailed answer that is quite appropriate to come from senior public servants.
We had, I believe, the elements of a good process. We, of course, will review that. The suggestion from the Deputy Opposition Leader that we actually get a committee to look at that is probably not a bad idea. We will talk about it further, but it does need to be looked at. We saw a better focus from the committee, once we did table all the answers. We actually got something done, rather than this tortured process of running around and around with questions asked that, in many cases, made no sense. I know that moving to accruals is difficult, and I will not stand here and say I do not find it difficult. Of course I find it difficult. If you look at the experience of other parliaments, of course, they found it difficult too. It is confusing for those who have worked in a cash framework, when you move to another. But to simply underpin every question with: ‘This must be a lie’, was absurd, particularly from a party that agreed to move to this accrual framework and put it in place, and who are accusing us of using so-called ruses which had been exactly the ones the previous government had given the year before, as we did that part move to outputs. It was very frustrating.
I hope we can actually review it in such a way that we make it a far more informative process next year. I hope that, having issues like the accrual process, we put mechanisms in place so when briefings are asked for, it does become easier giving the appropriate information that is asked for, before we hit the estimates time. I know, Mr Chairman, that you want ‘budgets for dummies’, but I do not think we can do it. Budgets are very complex. The accountability in budgets and some of the concepts are very complex. As much as it would be nice to have a very short document with a couple of lines of net appropriations, I do not think that is quite where we are heading in the 21st century.
I thank the Deputy Opposition Leader for his comments, but I say that it was not the most properly carried out process from the opposition. The way the questions were asked were, in many cases, simply offensive. The repetition of questions wasted the time of the committee, and I believe there was no real strategy about what the opposition was coming doing. Apart from trying to tear down the actual budget papers and say that, simply - following maybe the attitude that the opposition had in government last year - that you can actually write the bottom line, that they were perhaps transferring that onto our budget; which certainly is not the case.
I am proud of this budget. As Treasurer of a new government, I believe this budget book is really a major step forward in how we are accounting to Territorians. This budget book has more detail in it than we have seen in any budget books. I have had time over the last day, sitting upstairs watching proceedings, to go back and look at previous budget books. This one, as I pointed out numbers of times, lists the major variations in it …
Mr Dunham: Oh, no, it does not! Do you want us to take you back to those questions?
Ms MARTIN: We can hear the opposition laugh, but the laughter comes from a very scary base. It is one that says: ‘We produced a budget paper last year but you could not trust the figures’. You could not trust the figures last year, and they are trying to translate that kind of attitude to this budget, which comes under a very different legislative framework. We are proud of the Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act; of our move to accruals and Working for Outcome, and of this budget because, for a new government - and none of us here are pretending we know everything, we are learning and that learning curve will continue. We came into government with a very strong commitment: a commitment for better education for all Territorians, better health and greater community safety. We put that together with the strongest capital works budget we have ever seen. On those four points, we said that was what we would do; and that is what we have done.
I would like to make a final point on this. We sat there through the estimates, with the opposition trying to say we had been deceitful - we had been deceitful in saying that we had increased appropriations to those key areas. Yet, in my letterbox only the week before, I had the Opposition Leader’s newsletter. In it he said - addressing it to me personally which I thought was quite nice really - it had: ‘Hey, big spender’. There is a curious juxtaposition here: on one hand, saying: ‘You are not increasing allocations. So you are not increasing allocations, you are not increasing the appropriations’ - that was what we were accused of – ‘It is all a big lie, you are deceiving Territorians’. Yet he says: ‘Hey, big spender, you have all this extra money from the federal government’. Where did you think it went?
Mr Reed: And you are still taxing us $90 each for our car rego.
Ms MARTIN: We had the question from the Deputy Opposition Leader saying: ‘Where have you squirrelled all the extra money? Where is your hollow log?’. Our hollow log is demonstrated very clearly in this document: in health, education, community safety and capital works. It is all there, along with our deficit reduction strategies. Responsibly, what we have done with those increased relativities, is put them where they deserve to go, and where we committed that they would go: into education, health, community safety and capital works. We delivered in this budget what we said we would. From your point of view, opposition members, you have to get a consistent line. Either we are spending the money or not. You cannot run both lines. Either we got extra allocation from the federal government - which you said time and time again we did – and, yes, we did. We got those increased relativities. Where did you think they went? Did they disappear into some accrual accounting? No, they are real dollars in a real budget and we, on this side of the House, are very proud of it.
Mr DUNHAM: What a hard act to follow, Mr Chairman. When she does that pious hand on the heart thing, it is hard to keep ones gorge down. The last speaker talked about her frustration; her embarrassment;, she was sorry; and she found things offensive. Well, that is probably because this is the first opportunity we have had to have some reckoning about this budget. We have had opportunities, albeit small, in this parliament to talk about some of these things. But this is the opportunity for the people to look at the budget.
The Chief Minister went on at great length about all the promises they were going to implement: ‘That is what our new budget format is all about; it is called Working for Outcomes’, and that is what we wanted to see. The reason it took a fair while to get through the Auditor-General was because this was the first agency to come up and we could not reconcile. Okay, it is only a $1.5m or something, big deal! The budget could not be reconciled - one output group, tiny little budget, could not reconcile. That should have rung some alarm bells with the Chief Minister but she realised we wanted an audit trail, a paper trail, to demonstrate how significant government monies had found there way through the system.
The PAC spent a lot of time looking at $8m that was presentation for presentation purposes, albeit on the advice of the Under Treasurer, and in accord with accounting conventions and all the rest of it. We now have an accounting convention where there is $7.1m sitting in Health, which is totally out of line with anything that the Under Treasurer has done before. We know that there is about $10m there that is unaccounted for and there will be a paper trail to try to find that. We also know that this vain boast about $527m in Health is a furphy, because we know that there are significant amounts of dollars in there that are not available for services.
We know too, that there are some significant mistakes in this budget. I would say an $800m mistake ranks right up there. I do not think you would find mistakes much bigger than $800m in any budget. So, when we start to talk about: ‘Oh, you know, you had some difficulties with the document and you said it was all lies’ – no, we did not say it was all lies. However, we did pose the question to the Chief Minister: ‘Can you put your hand on this document and give a guarantee to the people of the Northern Territory that it is entirely correct?’, and she would not do it - she would not do it. It was probably pretty smart in the end, because, had she done it, we would have caught her out for fibbing - or at least being nave - because we found, I suppose, on our count now, up to 15 or so mistakes in that budget documentation. That is not a problem; it can be rectified. The Chief Minister and Treasurer has given an undertaking she will have an erratum sheet - which was your suggestion, Mr Chairman. That erratum sheet has probably now gone to about two pages. But it does show you the necessity for scrutiny. On a couple of occasions, departmental staff seemed to know about the error, and seemed to be waiting, hoping it would not be discovered. Well, it was, and I think that points to the necessity for this level of public scrutiny of a document.
The various stories about 30 hours, is a little like Working for Outputs. What you do is set a task, and then you give the resources - in this case, time resources - to achieve that task. It is a fairly simple thing for a government that has been breast-beating about the wonders that come out of accrual accounting and Working for Outcomes. It should be a simple task. You say: ‘We would like you to look at these substantial documents and a report to come back from you’. Now, you work out the calculations - what do you need for secretariat, chairs, seats and all those sorts of logistics - but you also work out time. There is no one – no one believes there was sufficient time for this exercise. Certainly the PAC did not believe that - and that includes three members of the government - and they quite readily signed off on a report saying that we needed two weeks. The solidarity argument that they talked about with the Leader of the Opposition wanting to put questions, and other members, as is their right, asking further questions; I would put the same question to government. Why don’t you talk to those three members of the PAC, who are quite knowledgeable about this process and say: ‘Do you reckon it is going to take two weeks?’ They would have said: ‘Yep, because that is what we told parliament’.
So, right from the outset, this thing was never going to fly. It is no good saying to us: ‘Well, you asked too many questions of the Chief Minister’. We had two hours of filibustering in this parliament before we even went in. We could have gone in at 9 am. We had this crazy spectacle of the Minister for Parks and Wildlife debating a document that he wanted to slip under the door, only a week or so before. The two hours that we spent in this parliament talking about various things that could have been done in some minutes, we could have quickly gone in. So, there is two hours we could have found. We could have found another couple of hours tonight, and we probably would have got there.
The fettering of this committee was done in an intentional way. It was done in a way that was calculated and intended to make sure that some ministers were able to hide behind the lack of time. I know in my portfolio areas, we are talking about $527m in the budget paper for Health. The Power and Water Authority is hundreds of millions. We had various other portfolio areas that add up to another, probably, about $1bn worth to look at. That is pretty significant cash. We should have had the opportunity to do that, and the government should probably be a little more brazen and courageous about this. We had the member for Sanderson saying: ‘We know what you want to do, you just want to dig up the dirt’. A few of them had the jitters a bit. It was a genuine straight up and down exercise. Most of the ministers would have realised that there was very little likelihood, unless they did something outrageously stupid, for them to find this a terminal exercise in terms of their ministerial careers.
However, the whole story about squandering time and the 30 hours, I think you can do it by computations, you can do it mathematically. And you can do it with some independent thought rather than just the thought of ‘Let us get in and out of here as quick as we can’.
I am very disappointed that, in Health and Community Services, I did not ask major questions on issues like HIV. It is a very topical issue at the moment; it is an issue that affects all of us. Drugs: the minister has chosen today to release a drugs policy. There a number of issues that come out of that, that are important for this parliament: issues relating to how a government does business, particularly promising for nurses, which we found to be a hollow promise. We found that there is a reduction of two, notwithstanding they are sending documents out presenting 20 as the increase. These are things the public need to know and they can only know if we have access to ministers, their documents, and their minders.
Otherwise, it is government by press release. That is what we have had for a year. We have had government by press release. The scrutiny that is given to a press release and to some of these media pronouncements are such that they are taken on face value and, as we found out in the last three days, they are often wrong. The public need to know that. They need to know these figures are wrong.
I applaud the work of the Chairman; he did a pretty good job. It was a difficult room, it was pretty tight. It was probably the wrong venue in some ways. There were a lot of other things attending on his time and mind other than what was happening on the floor. He had to contend with his usual recalcitrant side kick. When you look at all of that, I reckon he has done not too badly. I would like to think that he gave his best endeavours, and I think his best endeavours were not too bad. I am happy to say that on the Parliamentary Record.
In matters relating to the venue and things like that, there were obvious shortcomings, but some of those might have been hard to anticipate in the front and let us have another go. The timing could have been anticipated on day one, merely by reading the report of the PAC.
The business about hiding behind accrual accounting has to be put to bed. The line: ‘Well, you do not understand the new system of accrual accounting’ is a nonsense. It is a furphy. If it is paraded out every time there is a figure that is different, we have some significant problems with this entire budget because, every time there is a figure different; whether it is up, down - one of the figures that I used in a question was under the Uniform Presentation Format. It has nothing to do with accrual accounting. In that figure, Health drops $5m. The year before, the year after: the same input, the same factors. So you have to ask: why would the Australian Bureau of Statistics - or whatever device is used to input those figures - have a reduction in a department that has gone up $80m in the last year, from $447m in the May budget of last year to $527m in this budget - $80m? How could the ABS get it so wrong that it says it is down by $5m? I welcome people - inquirers into this debate and other researchers - to have a look at that because I still do not know why. I am sure the people of the department do not know why. Treasury does not know why. This is a comparative; this is not the furphy about accrual accounting. This is Uniform Presentation Format (UPF), one of these wonderful things that has come out of this Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act.
The Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act also says that you have to bring your budget in on time because the CEO is responsible. The Chief Minister told us that it was tantamount to an execution squad for CEOs who did not bring their budget in on target. Well, we found a few of them where the budget was way out of whack with the money they were given. So you have to ask the question: is this just the usual pre-election rhetoric dressed up in a different format, that, at the end of the day, really does not mean anything? It really does not mean anything, because what you do with your money is no big deal. Mistakes in the order of $800m have never been known in this parliament – never been known! I will guarantee you, your erratum list – that was a very smart idea - will run to two pages, I am quite sure of it. I am also sure that, in the interests of openness, transparency and honesty, those public servants who know there are errors in there can use it as a time to cleanse their conscience and divulge these errors in the budget. They are not going to get caught up and hauled before the Estimates Committee because it has done its job. But it does mean that, when you open the book and flick through it, you can have some reliability about the figures there.
I would like to thank the staff, especially Terry and Ros, but also the other staff of the parliament who came in. When this House has a stress in one area, they pretty much all help each other out; it is like a big family. While those two are obviously most deserving of the thanks of the committee, the House, once again, showed that it was able to cope with some new anomalous thing that just dropped in its lap, and it did it well.
While I am on that, it should be put on the record that the resources for the Speaker’s Office definitely are an issue of concern. The increasing cost of power in this place, and other increasing costs that are not deferrable, will mean that some of the good work of the committees, which are deferrable and which can be curtailed, could well be put in jeopardy by the budget that has been presented. I ask the government to take that on.
The business of the Leader of Government Business saying: ‘Well here are the answers, here you go’. That could have been done on day one. On day one he could have done it; it is the Tasmanian model. It is the one that he sent us off to have a look at: the day before you go in, you have all the answers. I understand your point of view, Mr Chairman, that you are not that fussed on it because it does mean that some of these things do not get into the permanent public record, because they are matters for politicians and do not find their way into the generic Hansard record. Nonetheless, there could be a hybrid. Maybe you will produce a report with all the questions and answers, and maybe you will produce a Hansard with supplementaries. There are ways through this; it is not that hard.
The Chief Minister was mightily offended that people were hostile to her or something - I cannot remember the word she used. However, she has to learn to mind her tongue because, when she was in there, she made a couple of comments that were provocative. I just put them down to the normal filibustering: when in trouble, resort to personal abuse, pick a little fight, then you can have a side show going while you get yourself out of trouble. A few ministers resorted to that. Certainly the minister for Industries and Development - or whatever he is - tried it, as did the Minister for Community Development and a few of the others. They wandered back into the past and did this little: ‘Nah nah, let me tell you about black holes and how things used to be’. I can understand that swagger. It must be good to have come out of being in opposition here after so many years, and being the ones sitting there saying: ‘Well, I do not care what you think’. However, that swagger is a thing called arrogance, and we saw it. We saw it manifest itself in such a way that it was evident to a lot of people. While the Chief Minister went out and said: ‘Oh look, there is a vindictive feel in there’, there were a lot of commentators who came out and said: ‘Look, I cannot believe the incompetence of the ministers who do not seem to understand fundamentals, and if something is not written down for them they cannot seem to think about the issue, and the swagger factor’. The swagger factor, it was right there. That is okay because, politically, it is to our benefit that the more arrogant you get, obviously, the more people might look at us as an attractive alternative at the next election.
I believe the future for the Estimates Committee is probably good; it is on a reasonable launch path. Those ministers who have fronted it now realise that it is not the boogie man they thought; that it was going to find all the dirt, as the member for Sanderson said. I am sure they will find that their careers will not be terminated by a visit to the Estimates Committee. So, let us get down to make the thing work. I am not saying that the PAC is not a competent place to look at it, but I support the idea that maybe it needs different eyes. I also support the idea that maybe the eyes that look at it include Madam Speaker and yourself, Mr Chairman, and it should be done on the basis of the machinery and the mechanics of the thing, and leave all the political rhetoric and all the rest of it away for another day. Let us look at how we can make this thing work, and work well.
Regarding some of the backslapping the government has done about what a wonderful beast it is; if you drew up a ledger there are certainly some things in its favour and some things against it. However, line ball, it is not as good as we used to have. That was one of the first hurdles we used to have to jump across because, as I said when we embarked on this path, the hurdle is that it has to be at least as good as what went before. What went before was the capacity for every member to ask a question until those questions were exhausted. It is no good saying that took 20 hours or whatever, because the prerogative of asking questions and supplementaries belonged to the opposition, and you chose to take 20 hours. So, I would say the first hurdle of exhausting those questions was not cleared.
The second hurdle was being at least comparable with some of the promises made by the Labor Party. It did not make that run either; it is nowhere near that hurdle. We know, for starters, that that was a promise of legislation, and this whole beast was only forced, I daresay, because I introduced a Private Members Bill which still sits on the paper. That subtle prod was a bit of a wake-up call for the government, who said: ‘Oh, budget is coming on and we made all those promises to the punters. We had better set this thing up and call it the Estimates Committee’. What they did was they re-branded what was Committee of a Whole in here and made it go to a different room. We could have all worn silly hats, for all I know, just to make it look like it was differentiated from what went before.
What went before was a hell of a lot like this; it was pretty similar. If you look at the advantages of what went before, some of it was much better. This is a better place; it is easier for the public, it is easier for the media, so there are three ticks. The fact that we exhausted all the questions: this could have been something that could have built on what went before, and it did not. I will be generous enough to say that if you look at the ledger, maybe it is line ball. But I would say those two failings: of not being better than what went before, and not at least living up to the promises of government, leave you with a bit of a smell about this; and it is a smell you can fix up. You should do it by designing adequately and far enough out, how we are going to do it next year. That should be done on the basis: first step, adequacy of time. Because it was obvious to blind Freddy that that was not going to be achieved on this occasion.
Mr KIELY: Mr Chairman, much is being made in this debate about time and the venue of the Estimates Committee. I would also like to throw into the mix a piece on the quantity and quality of the questions and answers, but I will go back to the time issue. The Estimates Committee did meet for something like 32 hours. Historically, that has proven to be a fairly reasonable time. The time that was set down was known quite well to the opposition, as well as to the ministers. The block of time was known well ahead, so we went into the process on the understanding that time management would be adhered to; that shadow ministers would be able to construct their questions around that. As a matter of fact, there was the opportunity to submit questions prior to going into the committee, of which the opposition amassed something like 1100. So, full points to them.
Yet, when we got in there, we found that the concept of time management seemed to have gone out the window. We had the first member before the committee, the Speaker, I think she was on for something like 1 or 2 hours. Then we had the Chief Minister who was on for something in the vicinity of 15 hours; and the Deputy Chief Minister was on for 9 hours. Then we saw quite a change come about, and I will get to what happened with that change and why we saw a far more rapid turnaround of the ministers before the committee after that.
But when you get to the time, you really have to wonder why, when it was known well in advance that we had 30 hours, the opposition did not have a look and construct their approaches as to how they were going to interrogate the Appropriations Bill in a far more disciplined manner? I was pretty amazed at the amount of time it took to interrogate the portfolio responsibilities of the Chief Minister. I was also amazed about the quality of the questions and the way they were put. We had all these written questions there, and they were going through one at a time. They would ask that written question and then the response would be stated to them, and then out came the supplementaries.
I could understand the shadow minister asking the supplementary. I could understand them asking the question without notice, but I really started to wonder why the other MLAs were getting in on the act. When you look at time management, if there had been a bit of discipline from the other side, then the other MLAs would have either handed all those questions - which did not relate to their own electorates might I say - over to the shadow minister and had the shadow minister ask them, and get some roll-on; some way that you could actually get down and interrogate. Instead, what we saw going through, particularly with the Chief Minister, was what I consider to be point scoring.
There was no real effort to interrogate the outputs. There was, what I consider, a superficial look at the actual appropriation, but was that was more in the way of trying to score points and show whose figures were what, and ‘our figures were best in the last budget’. During that interrogation, the matter of accrual accounting and the changes that are going on became pretty clear also. The changes to accrual accounting have been going on for quite some years; quite some years. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who was the Treasurer in the previous government, stated that he understands it. But it became pretty clear - I am not having a swipe at the other side, because it is probably amongst our own members as well - that there is a lack of understanding of what accrual accounting means. I have a very fundamental idea of accrual accounting from my previous employment, but I appreciate that I need more training on it. I would really like to say that when the member for Drysdale was talking about maybe getting it better next year, one of the things we should be looking at is for all members to go off and get some training on accrual accounting, because this is the only way that we are really going to interrogate the Appropriation Bill properly.
It is not a matter of trying to point score, trying to see if you can dumb up the minister, because you will not. I tell you why you will not, because sitting behind them is a highly skilled public service. It is the highly skilled public service who can come up with those answers. But if the people who are interrogating the Appropriation Bill, who are questioning the minister on different items, do not understand it, then they are all over the place, and it really detracts from the quality of the review of the budget.
When we talked about time, you could not help but notice how, when the opposition did not have those questions and answers in front of them, they took a long time; they were asking a lot of supplementaries. However, with the foresight of the Deputy Chief Minister, who thought: ‘Well look, we have to do something to help the opposition along to try to assist them get through and get as much access to as many ministers, to as many line items as possible’, when he said: ‘Okay, what we will do is provide you with the answers’ - that was about 7.30 pm last night – well, we saw a really huge change, didn’t we? The Deputy Chief Minister was in the chair then and he went through right into the morning. The Chief Minister was in there for 15 hours, the Deputy was in there for about nine. Then he saw the Justice Minister - a very complex portfolio - who was in there for about three hours. The Minister for Business, Industries and Resource Development was in there for approximately two hours. The Minister for Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs was in there for – I think for only one hour. Then the Minister for Health and Community Services was there for about two hours.
Let me say when you have a look at the time the Minister for Health and Community Services was there, that is where we saw one of the best uses of the Estimates Committee as it was structured, because the member for Drysdale came in with a very, very complex question about the budget going right back over the years and she had the information there from those people who were assisting her, and she could roll that straight out to him. The member for Drysdale also asked her a very complex question about severance of the previous CEO. Bang! Got that answer straight up and was able to move on. That is how the Estimates Committee should work; that is how the process should work. I commend the Minister for Health and Community Service for her foresight, her employees who stood in for her, and the Executive Officer of the Office of the Commissioner of Public Employment.
When we get on to the quantity and quality of the questions, the fact of the matter is that, in this process, we still answered 1100 questions. That is the 1100 written questions, not to mention I do not know how many supplementary questions were answered - but we did answer them; they are sitting on the record. That speaks volumes of itself. That was in 32 hours. So, this government probably answered in the vicinity of 1500 questions, I would suggest - maybe more. We will get the count later. That is the real result here.
When we look a the quality of the questions, however, there was so much point scoring going on from the opposition - they were so much trying to play the man and not the ball - that I did not hear too many questions on indigenous education, or the state of the public sector. I heard very few questions on actual health outcomes, and that goes through all the other portfolios, too. So, on the actual work of government and the services that we are providing in the community, I did not here anything. All I heard was shadow ministers trying to climb in to the ministers and score cheap political points. There are two reasons why this thing fell over, as far as the time lines go: one is that the shadow ministry does not reflect what the actual Cabinet looks like, so they were confused about where to come in and out and how to ask questions. They did not get together - that was pretty clear - and have a look at a strategy on how to best interrogate and find out what outputs they really wanted to address. Second, there was a lack of discipline. When their leader tried to call them to heel, they did not; they all still wanted to grab a bit of the glory.
There is so much more to talk about in the Estimates Committee, so much more I would love to address. However, I have run out of time. I would like to finish by saying that the responses from the Deputy Opposition Leader about thanks to everyone else, I echo those. A special thanks to the Chairman; he did a marvellous job under very stressful conditions. I think it was excellent, and I commend him for his fortitude, tolerance and forbearance, and that also goes to all the ministers who appeared.
Mr CHAIRMAN: Maybe we could ask for more time for backbenchers to speak to Appropriation Bills.
Mr ELFERINK: Mr Chairman, naturally, one of the first comments I make is that, in one of my major portfolio areas of Parks and Wildlife, I was unable, because of the process that we chose to go down as a parliament, to ask some questions in relation to Parks and Wildlife. That is a shame because I was really looking forward to quizzing the minister in relation to what he was going to do with the money that he was asking us to interrogate.
Indeed, I was fortunate enough on a couple of occasions to speak to ministers such as the Chief Minister herself, in her capacity as the Minister for Arts and Museums, to interrogate what she was planning to do with the money. I was gratified, although it was very difficult to be critical about such a positive budget for Arts and Museums, to be able to engage in a two-way conversation, which was largely constructive, about where the money was going. It disappoints me, of course, that in Parks and Wildlife, through DIPE, I was unable to ask questions; specifically one which has become very close to my heart.
This is a problem with the process. I do not think that either side will walk away from this Chamber and honestly say that the process was flawless. I do not believe it was flawless. One of my greatest disappointments about it, of course, is that we ran out of time. When we established the Estimates Committee process, it was already in the mind of the Deputy Chief Minister that this was a possibility, because, in his summation to the debate dealing with the establishment of the Estimates Committee, he predicted that this may be a possible outcome of the Estimates Committee process.
There were times when this particular side of the House was used grill, inside this Chamber in the old committee process, the appropriation process. It has already been pointed out that, in those times, it was quite possible for such a process to go for many hours – 47 hours, I think, was the longest period I had ever heard of. I believe, Mr Chairman, that you yourself believe that there is room for some expansion of time for ministers. Perhaps 14 hours for the Chief Minister was too long. I believe the system in Tasmania is that they use nine hours a minister, and that should be enough time to interrogate a budget. I hope that, in the future, when we come to reviewing what has happened in the last couple of days, that we do visit the issue of time, because we have to understand the context in which this particular process was taking place.
Under the old system, where members of the opposition came in here, the budget papers were pretty much understood and accepted, as the Chief Minister pointed out. Through that process, a whole series of questions were fired off, and those people who fired those questions off were able to follow up with supplementaries. The Hansard is full of the then Deputy Leader of the Opposition asking supplementary questions of ministers on repeated occasions. Certainly, the former member for Macdonnell, Mr Neil Bell and the former for Wanguri, Mr Bailey, used to – I will not say ‘torture’, it is probably the wrong word - interrogate the budget process and interrogate it hard. That process was not necessarily a bad one.
Perhaps working into the wee small hours of the morning was something that could have been looked at, and an extra sitting day may have been appropriate in that period. I pick up on what the member for Drysdale had to say in relation to which system was better. I quite like the idea of being able to sit down and interrogate the budget directly over the table where there are public servants sitting next to the ministers, because the expert advice of those departments is useful for getting information out of those departments expeditiously.
The only problem is that the room was too cluttered, in many ways, during the estimates debate. I have to say, I would like a whole lot more table space next time round just for the reams of paperwork. I made the observation to several people while I was there that it looked like the bureaucratic equivalent of trench warfare at one stage, with the carnage along our table being reminiscent of it. When the further answers were delivered, I suddenly realised that trench warfare had taken a new step forward, with the big artillery, and we were then fighting the battles of Passchendaele on the Somme. However, I think that it is worth noting that those sorts of practical issues are very real. I watched it, as a very, very busy room. If you like busy places, that was certainly the place to be. Certainly, the matter of the structure of the room deserves visiting again.
I do not agree with the comments by the Chief Minister that Budget Paper No 3, in this instance, should not have been interrogated. I believe that it should have been interrogated. It is a legitimate thing to interrogate something like a budget paper and any other associated document that comes to a committee. It is worth interrogating it for the purposes of establishing the security for the foundations upon which you are working. The interrogation process, especially now that we are working with a new budgetary system, was always going to take longer. The Chief Minister herself had said, on several occasions that, effectively, the Treasury have put together four budgets in the space of 12 months. That may be true, and for that reason alone, we should have allowed more time because it was a new system, and that new system was going to create some confusion. The Chief Minister herself has admitted and accepted that that has been the case. That confusion was going to be a time-consuming exercise. It was also a new system in which, when we inquired or asked questions of Madam Speaker in the Legislative Assembly, we were all surprised how far over time that ran, because the new system was something we were trying to feel our way into. So, things like a new accrual accounting system-based set of budget papers are going to require interrogation, and it is reasonable that members of the opposition try and inquire of members of government, and that those members of government are actually capable of understanding the documentations in front of them, at least to the degree where they can answer questions. I believe that was the thrust of much of the line of questioning from the members of the opposition.
Returning to what I was saying before, I hope that upstairs one of the minister’s Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment people is listening, because my much-loved question - question No 896, which I harrowed the poor Chairman over on repeated occasions - did not get to see the light of day. I can only say that I am crestfallen over the fact that this question did not get up. There are several bullet points in relation to the answer I was given on paper. It was one I was thoroughly looking forward to asking some questions on, because the bullet points do not go anywhere near what I require. I have to say that it is an awful shame. So, I ask the minister to return his attention to the 65 vacant positions in his department that I have identified in this question, and position to position, at this time - today if you like - tell me what is happening with those positions. I would like to hear from the minister: what has happened to the ‘Horticulturalist T1R, position No 14875’? What has happened to that vacancy? Has the position been cut? Has it disappeared off the face of the planet? Is there somebody now working in that job?
I ask the minister what has happened to ‘Hydro Assistant, Technical 2, position No 13115’? What has happened to that job? What has happened to the person who used to fill that job? Is the department going to fill any of these 65 positions? It is a very important issue for the people of the Northern Territory, and I am deeply concerned that these jobs have been lost to the people of the Northern Territory. I feel the minister’s obfuscation - especially when the question itself disappeared out of my paperwork when it was delivered. Its omission was immediately concerning to me because it is a question I have been hounding, pursuing, the minister on for quite some time. There are 65 positions here about which still remains unanswered. I would very much hope that the minister will take the time to be kind enough to even offer me a briefing, perhaps, on these 65 positions, so that I might find out what has happened to the ‘Planning Officer, Professional 2, position No 4460’.
It would have also been good to make further inquiries in relation to some of the answers I have been given in writing. I have to say that I picked up the comments by the member for Sanderson, that once the answers had been handed over, the process did, indeed, seem to go more smoothly. My only complaint or criticism, is that if that was such a great way to expedite the process, it should have happened on the Monday. Or, better still, perhaps on the Friday before the weekend so we would have had time to peruse it, and then create a series of supplementary questions which were incisive, which did demonstrate themselves to be worthy of the process the government has put into place.
The old system was attractive to me because the process allowed itself one advantage that this process does not, and that was the ability for their minister to stand up and say: ‘All done, any more questions from the floor?’ There be a long pause: ‘Any more questions from the floor? Does anybody have anymore questions?’, going, going, gone. Unfortunately, the time limit which has been applied in this process has removed that ability. I would like to see a system of supplementary questions be created where it can be incisive and the effects of those supplementary questions can reduce the time spent. But it is important that all inquiries need to be exhausted and I would like the system again returned. However, I would like to see it look less thrown together than it was on this occasion - and that is no reflection on the staff of the Legislative Assembly who had to work off a mud map at the best, very quickly, to throw together a system. Now that we are going to stick to the system - it has been decided that we are going to stick to it – I would like to have that one important factor built into it: that everything that is done around that committee should have attached to it the assumption that the minister, at the end of the day, will be able to say: ‘Are there any more questions?’, because the integrity of the appropriation process hangs on that one issue. If the minister cannot stand up and say: ‘I was able to stand up and ask the whole committee if there were any more questions’, then the minister cannot truly say that the parliament had entirely agreed to the appropriation that the minister was seeking.
However, we live and learn, Mr Chairman, and I hope to see an improved system next time round.
Mr McADAM: Mr Chairman, I speak briefly tonight in respect of the public hearings of the Estimates Committee and also the tabling of the report. I must say that, as a new member of parliament, I guess I was rather amused and sometimes perplexed in respect to the whole exercise. In certain circumstances, other members were as well, given the new process.
The thing that concerned me most was the fact that members opposite were always aware of the process in respect to this Estimates Committee. I can recall when the Leader of Government Business in the House, the Deputy Chief Minister, made it very clear in the August sittings as to what that process would be. Members opposite have had that opportunity to develop strategies, to work out precisely how they were going to approach it or, indeed, coordinate their approach. It is for that reason that I was a little disappointed in respect to how we operated as a committee. But, at the same time, I believe that there are some speakers tonight who have, in a very positive way, already given some suggestions in respect to what some of the changes might be. You will also be aware that the Deputy Chief Minister, the Leader of Government Business in the House, gave an assurance, as I understood it at the time, that he would undertake a review process. Some of the suggestions will go part of the way in respect to making it a far better exercise in the future.
The other thing that I want to say is that, because there were some very venomous exchanges on occasions - and it does not speak well of us as politicians in the Territory, because I believe that the Territory is maturing as a state, if I could call it that, and we have been doing that very slowly over the last few years. It is incumbent upon us, as members of this parliament and representatives of people in the Territory, that we perhaps take a step back and consider just how we behave in such circumstances. I have no intentions tonight to lay blame in respect of any particular member, but I share the Chief Minister’s view in respect of the sometimes contemptuous manner in which we treated some public servants. Already, people in this House tonight have acknowledged that they worked very, very hard in respect of fulfilling their obligations to this exercise and, indeed, to us. I felt, on occasions, a little ashamed that we did not treat them with the respect that they deserve. To me, that is of immense concern particularly, as I said previously, because they are also members of this Territory community and they thoroughly deserve respect.
The other issue that I want to raise tonight which we have to give some consideration to, is the fact that perhaps the venue was not the best place. It is all okay to talk in retrospect in regard to those sorts of things, but there are real opportunities in making this exercise a far better one in the future.
Many of the things I was going to say have actually been covered by other speakers but, in conclusion, just let me say that I think it was a learning exercise for all of us over the last three days. It is incumbent upon us to ensure that we put in place a process that is going to provide the best possible information to the people of the Northern Territory. I am absolutely convinced given, in certain circumstances, the support portrayed by the other side in regards to the future of this.
Finally, just let me say to Terry Hanley and to Ros Vogeli: I know you put in a lot of hard hours. I, too, would like to extend my appreciation to them for their hard work that they have put in and, indeed, to all parliamentary staff and the members of Hansard who worked very, very hard. The Chairperson of the Committee, the member for Johnston, Chris Burns, did a very, very professional job. It was, indeed, a very difficult job, and I think Chris’ conduct of the whole hearing, in many cases held the committee together. So to you, member for Johnston, I extend my very sincere appreciation.
A final word, and I say this quite seriously to members on the other side: be part of a process, be constructive, treat our fellow Territorians and, particularly, our public servants with the respect they deserve. I am absolutely certain that subject to this review, next year or the year after, we will have a process in place that will basically provide the people of the Territory with information and the scrutiny that they so justly deserve.
Mr MILLS: Mr Chairman, following on from a theme raised by the member for Barkly that the Territory is maturing, I say that this process that we have all been involved in is one that has matured us, as well. The idea of inputs and outputs and what on earth they really do mean, and the phrases that are used in the budgetary process - if we are honest about it - are genuinely challenging. For us, as elected representatives, to get a real grasp of that and to play our role genuinely, we do really need to understand the budget. From the opposition’s side, the amount of work that actually does go into formulating questions is instructive in itself, because you need to have a sense of what you need to know. What you do not know has to be defined by the body of knowledge that you already have a sense of. So, that was instructive for myself and for members on this side, to be involved in that process. I am sure that, for the ministers who were the recipients of questions that were being formulated on the opposition side, it was also quite instructive to be prepared for the process of estimates.
We mature as elected representatives. I believe, as a shadow minister, I have learnt a lot through this process and, as a member of the opposition and a member of this Chamber. What I have learnt as a member of this Chamber is that there are other ways of doing things. Initially, perhaps instinctively, unsure about going into new places, I had a sense that the appropriation system that we had in place was more than adequate. I have learnt, through this process, that there are elements of the estimates process that are beneficial. I do not think you have heard a disendorsement of the central notion of the estimates process as being anything less than positive for producing a better outcome for Territorians.
It is quite clear that time was the issue. I have to say – and it may not be understood on the other side - that, in a sense, the excitement of the newness of this whole thing, the first day, had us actively and deeply engaged in the process. It was a bit like, I suppose, getting so engrossed in this process that the essence of what this was really about was all-encompassing, and I found it genuinely engrossing. However, that is where I find some difficulties with the criticisms that have been raised by members of government, with respect to how opposition behaved. They constantly went to the simplistic position of saying: ‘Well, once when you had appropriation you had this amount of time, and now we have estimates, so it should be about the same amount of time. That is fair, isn’t it?’ We often heard the apples with apples debate. We are not comparing apples with apples. This is a completely different process and, as the minister for Education noticed, it was actually quite a constructive engagement, going back and forth, seeking clarification of particular issues. We all benefited from that. The only way to make full use of this, is one that is going to take a lot of time. It is not just the time of asking the question, but of consulting and formulating an appropriate answer which, once again, has to be responded to and so on. So, the whole process is one that does require a certain amount of time.
There is a contrast between two aspects here. There is a full endorsement, I would have to say for myself personally, and my colleagues, as we get together and form a formal response to this but, generally, we do support the concept. Of course, there are aspects of the process - namely time - that we would like primarily addressed, and that will be the topic of discussion at later times. I have to say that our actions, in opposition, would have demonstrated that we supported the central notion of the Estimates Committee. However, in doing so, we also were able to demonstrate that there were fundamental flaws in the process.
Many of the points that I wish to raise have already been raised, so I probably do not need to add anything else, other than, the maturity that would come as a result of being engaged in a process such as this. Something that I found most beneficial is that the parliament here sometimes - well most often, I think, we would walk away from finding that it is quite unsatisfactory in terms of actually doing anything constructive. It is often draw a line down the middle and just shout at each other, and then put it to the vote and guess who wins. It is not really progressing the issue. Whereas, for the first time - as maybe a ‘newish’ member being involved in the estimates process - I found the engagement across the table was really stimulating, because you are actively involved in the questioning. The questions were not like questions in Question Times, because it was able to go backwards and forwards. There was a whole line of questions, and the questions come as a result of understanding what the community needs and how the mechanics of the budget are able to genuinely deliver this outcome. So, that whole backwards and forwards thing was really a very good experience. That was something very special for me and a number of members on our side would concur with that point of view.
Without going any further with lots of the points that have already been raised: attacking aspects or supporting this side and whatever – I am not too interested and we are too tired for all that. Thanks and appreciation has to go to the PAC because, whereas some of us could come and go, they remained; particularly the Chairman. Compliments to the member for Johnston. It was a very difficult task and you did it admirably. For Terry Hanley and Ros Vogeli and the Legislative Assembly staff, there is genuine appreciation for the amount of work that you individually did and the support that you have given. Also to the Hansard staff who have done an outstanding job.
I take the member for Barkly’s comments that departmental officers may have perceived our questioning to have been a little strong at times. I can assure you that the intent was one which carried the best interests of Territorians at heart. If any offence was committed against any departmental officer, I hope they realise that it was not intended; our intention was to ascertain to our satisfaction the issues that were being discussed at that point. So, thanks to every departmental officer who was involved in the many functions that I have attended in the last few days. The day after we submitted our questions, particularly, I kept running into public servants who gave me the impression that they were working on the questions. I was very mindful of constructing questions, knowing that what I was writing would be work for a member of some department or agency out there. I was also mindful of knowing that the work we do is important work, but we do not want to add unnecessary burdens on those who are here to support us in our task of representing Territorians.
For the ministerial staff supporting the ministers, and for the ministers themselves, credit to you all; and for members on this side and in government. With those few comments, I look forward to how this whole issue will unfold. I will certainly be playing an active part with my colleagues on both sides of the House, and my good mate here, the Independent, on making sure whatever we come up with will be of immense benefit to Territorians.
Mr STIRLING: Mr Chairman, I am greatly encouraged by the positive comments coming forward in this debate tonight, particularly when you get such positive comments from the members for Katherine and Drysdale, who often find it difficult to get positive about too much that the government does. It encourages me even further because - whilst there are difficulties with the process, and that is recognised - there is solid commitment and support to look closely at the Estimates Committee, to ensuring that an Estimates Committee process goes forward and we do not go back to Committee as a Whole.
A couple of the points made in relation to the review: government was committed, at the outset, to a review of the process, because we did not make any claims that we were going to have the process perfect first time up. We said this would be a trial. We did not take the step of legislating any of the steps at this stage, because we wanted to see how it would work, and that review process will go forward. The original idea was that the Public Accounts Committee itself would undertake the task of reviewing the Estimates Committee process and debate putting forward recommendations and changes for the future. The member for Katherine had a slightly different view as to what might form a committee, and I was here when the Chief Minister said that she would take those comments on board. So we have a situation of a commitment to a review, but perhaps not quite sure what body or who will quite undertake that review. Nonetheless, that will occur, and we will ensure that members have an opportunity to put their views forward.
Much has been said about time. Thirty-two-and-three-quarter hours was allowed at the gong tonight at 6.40 pm, against 30 hours and 28 minutes last year, 28 hours and 40 minutes the year before, 28 hours 51 minutes the year before that, 27 hours and 7 minutes the year before that which was 1998, and we go back to those two marathons of 1997 and 1996, both remarkably coming in at 41 hours and 11 minutes each, despite being a year apart. At the same time, being the same dates, the 17 to 19 June 1996, and 17 to 19 June 1997. So, a remarkable coincidence on those counts.
I am not convinced that the quantity of time itself was so much the problem, but more how it was used, particularly in the first two days of debate. When you are going to spend 14 hours with a minister out of all-up 32 hours, the committee and opposition members should have been aware that they were closing down the amount of time they would have left for each minister. I was before the committee for nine hours. I do not mind that; Education is a $500m budget, 3600-odd staff; on top of that, Police, Fire and Emergency Services with its $100m plus, almost 1000 staff; Racing, Gaming and Licensing, a revenue earner for us. I welcome the fact that I had that opportunity before the committee to address more fully the answers that were provided in the supplementaries that were given. Unfortunately, other ministers were not given that opportunity, not just for opposition but for this parliament, for government and for the people of the Territory.
It is very wrong that the seventh minister did not get before the committee at all, and we have to work together, I suggest, to ensure that that does not occur again. In fact, I think it was the member for Katherine, and may have been the member for Drysdale as well, who said that it was not too much longer that was needed. On balance, at the end of the debate, the member for Katherine probably said a couple of hours. If we had not used that couple of hours first-up on the Tuesday morning, it may well have been enough to get us there. I am sure 32 hours was enough to get us there, to every minister before the committee, if more diligent use of the time had been applied over the first two days or so of the committee.
The answers going across on the Wednesday night was obviously a facilitator of the process. It was acknowledged by some speakers, including the members for Blain and Drysdale. I could not believe the outrage that that caused at the committee, when I tried to explain to the committee that I had written to the Chairman putting forward a proposal that government was going to drop all of the answers down to the committee rooms 24 hours in advance of the close of the process, so that those ministers yet to come before the committee, and those interested in those responses had a chance to get across them and perhaps get more strategic about those areas that they wanted to go into further detail, having gone across the hours. I understand afterwards and during that debate, that the malevolence that was directed at me at that time was a result of misunderstanding of exactly what I was trying to do, because a view had been formed that I was trying to close down the process. I was, of course, trying to help it by having the answers delivered down there. Nonetheless, that set a pretty poor tone for a while there.
Mr Mills: The tone of the letter did not help at all.
Mr STIRLING: Well, you made that point very clearly, that it was a question of the tone, and I accept responsibility for that. Nonetheless, I was as frustrated as no doubt you were, at sitting cooling my heels for 14 hours of committee time, during which time I would have thought - we only ever had the Treasurer, Chief Minister, and those occasions when the Treasurer was the Chief Minister, on their feet for a couple of hours at any time. 14 hours was extraordinary. I still maintain that 32 hours was ample. It is not the quantity; it is much more a question of how it was used.
I was interested in the question of the location. I agree with those who commented on it - the members for Barkly, Katherine and Drysdale - not ideal in terms of space and the number of people who did want to come in and observe the process. We welcome that, and as a parliament we should, and we should encourage more of it. Perhaps the Chan Building is an alternative venue. It is pretty handy to us here, it is just a walk across the road. It is a large venue. I had difficulties with the set-up of the room. I had a picture that you would have the committee seated together, and those members who wanted to ask questions seated, perhaps, a little apart from the committee so it was a very clear structure as to what we were facing. When I walked in there to see the process shortly after commencement, with the Chief Minister as the minister before the committee - in fact, the Speaker before that - it was difficult for me to understand who was who. The Chairman was separated from the committee by virtue of being at one end, up with the assistants, and the committee down another side. That has to be placed in a much more positive fashion so that the committee is clearly recognised in a prominent place in the room.
I foresaw this difficulty, and I take responsibility for not driving a harder bargain with many of the negotiating sessions I had with the member for Katherine in the lead-up to the final 5 hour debate we had in here in putting this process in place. This was the idea of how many people might be present to ask questions at any one time. I was of a view, initially, that you would have the committee, and that those other members wanting to ask questions should play a bit of a tag team or an interchange bench, so that the member of the committee would substitute for another member coming on. I thought that would have been a tighter and more orderly process in the sense of, perhaps, only keeping five or six people as part of committee at any one time. I was dissuaded from that course by the member for Katherine who argued – cogently, I must say - that we had to bear in mind not to weaken the process from the Committee of the Whole in the parliament.
Of course, the Committee of the Whole has the facility for any member at any time to ask a question or a supplementary question in relation to their electorate, or on a particular question that is before the committee at any time. I was taken with the strength of the argument in the sense that I wanted the committee process to work, to be an enhancement on the Committee of the Whole. So, we worked through this and decided yes, it was fair that any member could jump on any question at any time, although there was priority first to committee members, the shadow minister, and then other members. That was not always strictly applied throughout the committee process, but it did seem to me to be over-cumbersome; that there were too many people there. Certainly, when I went down, as I said, when the Chief Minister was there, there were eight people asking questions, all over the place. Now, we have to be more strategic and have a more orderly process. I do not have the answers, but I am sure the process of consultation and review may provide some of those answers to some of the difficulties that I saw.
I stress, however, that in the end the process, as always was going to be the case, there were written answers to all the questions that were provided in advance. I still think it was very wrong that the Minister for Infrastructure, Planning and Environment did not get before the committee, and we do have to ensure that that never occurs again.
I commend the committee for the work that they did; not an easy task. I particularly single out, as I think every other speaker in the debate has, the efforts of the Chairman of the Estimates Committee, the member for Johnston. I thought he chaired objectively. Certainly, on one occasion, his voice was raised, and there was good cause for it to be raised at that time. But generally, his sense of humour, his even-handedness, kept a handle on the process pretty much throughout, with at least one exception that I personally witnessed, which I thought was unfortunate. However, even in that situation, I thought he handled it very well. I congratulate the member for Johnston; I thought he did a terrific job.
I thank all public servants who appeared before the committee, and the efforts that they went to, to provide the answers. As the member for Blain was saying, he was conscious, when he was preparing his questions, that some public servant, somewhere, would be providing an answer - as we always were in opposition, because we knew that we were going to be keeping people busy for quite some time, when we were putting those questions in advance to the government.
Finally, the officers of the Assembly, who go the extra mile when it is required, and they certainly did on this occasion. My personal thanks to officers who supported and assisted me throughout the Estimates Committee process, those from Racing, Gaming and Licensing, the Department of Employment, Education and Training, and the Northern Territory Police. My final thanks and special mention to the Under Treasurer, Ms Jennifer Prince, whose thorough understanding - and sometimes you wish you could excise a part of someone else’s brain and just hook it into the back of your head; it might make things a bit easier. Certainly, in the case of the brain that Jennifer Prince carries around in her head, there are certain parts of it that I would like transplanted into mine, if it were possible. Unfortunately, she has gained that level of expertise over many years of experience, and a level that I would never aspire to achieve. However, I hope, over time, to at least get a greater understanding of all of these matters than I currently have. I am pleased that we have someone like Jennifer Prince who we have the opportunity to learn from.
Overall, I am very encouraged. We never said we were going to get it perfect first up, and it is clear we have not; but we are not that far from it either. I hope that a process of review is an open brainstorming session, that we get lots of ideas from to improve it and to ensure, at the end of the day, that every minister comes before that committee in future.
Dr LIM: Mr Chairman, I feel I need to say a few words about the whole process that we have had the last three days. I do not wish to be adversarial by any means. I believe the estimates process can be, indeed, a very useful manner through which we can interrogate the budgets from now until whenever we decide to change the process once again. However, it is my belief also that the system was flawed right from the very beginning. The intention of setting up this Estimates Committee process was to improve on what was previously used by the former government.
That system had to be the benchmark. Using that as the benchmark, there were nine ministers, interrogated by seven opposition members during most years. For whatever reasons, I believe that the human resource aspects of the then opposition impacted immensely on the process that occurred when the CLP budgets were interrogated by the Labor opposition. They had seven people; they had to interrogate nine ministers with their many portfolios. I recall that, in the eight years that I have been in this Chamber, frequently - not all the time, but frequently - questions were asked and answers were accepted without any supplementary questions; hence, the process moved along quite rapidly. The questions were already handed out as written questions and the ministers had prepared their responses to them. Very occasionally, there were supplementaries, but the supplementaries were not very inquisitorial or did not require the minister to respond in depth.
This time around, we had 10 opposition members, two Independent members, and members of the government backbench who were also interested in asking questions. Of the 10 members of the opposition, five of us were in Cabinet previously, so had a fairly good understanding of the budgetary process, particularly the former Treasurer. The 10 of us worked very hard to produce meaningful questions - questions that went very, very deep into the rationale of the budget. Using our expertise, we were able to ask the questions that would elicit appropriate and accurate information, provided the information was given by the respondent.
The Chief Minister was in the chair for 12, 14 hours - however many hours that she might have been there. I thought that a lot of it was partly of her own making, in that she was not able to respond to many of the questions because she did not have a great grasp of accrual accounting and she needed a lot of advice from the people around her. If anybody had taken the time to measure how much of the 14 hours she took as pauses while she discussed responses with her officers, it would suggest that the Chief Minister would have not been in the chair any longer than the former Chief Minister or the former Treasurer had been on their feet during the time of the CLP government. So, I do not believe that there was any justification for the government members to accuse the opposition today of time wasting, squandering, and being poor time managers, as they all suggested.
Yesterday, when we received the letter handed in by the Leader of Government Business to the Chairman of the Estimates Committee, and the second paragraph accused the opposition of squandering time, I thought it was very inflammatory, and it made me very angry. I believe that is was highly inappropriate of the minister to have done that. To then offer the opposition all the written answers within the hour - which did occur - would suggest to me that all that paperwork was already ready in the minister’s offices, probably days ahead. That process could have been expedited, as the member for Macdonnell said, even late last week. We provided the questions in the appropriate format, plus all the generic questions on all portfolios, as requested by the secretariat. So we did not do anything deliberate or mischievous to cause the government any grief. What we did was follow the requests of the secretariat.
The generic questions which appear to now have caused some difficulties were provided because they were very useful in eliciting, first of all, the depth of knowledge that the ministers may or may not have of their portfolios. It also allowed the opposition to determine the veracity of the figures in the documents that were produced in the budget. And, did we not show that many of the figures were flawed? That is the purpose of interrogating a budget. Had the Chief Minister not used the 14 hours that she did, and had we been provided with the written responses earlier than last night, things might have gone a lot quicker.
Then, as the day progressed today and time was running short, the minister for Community Development came to the Estimates Committee and started the filibuster. That was the most inappropriate behaviour that I could think of. Questions were put to the minister who could have responded quickly but, instead, he just went off on several tangents. It got to the stage where, in order to allow more important portfolios to be interrogated as well, I chose not to ask the minister any questions at all. It was a pointless exercise, in my mind but, if that is the way he wants to demonstrate to Territorians that is how honestly he can run his portfolio, so be it. I will live with the unfortunate circumstance of not being able to interrogate my portfolio as well as I could have. And believe you me, I had a swathe of questions that I felt I needed to follow up, particularly on issues of FAGs, on local government reforms, on IHANT, and on many of the issues that are very pertinent to remote Northern Territory, which I understand the minister himself is very interested in.
We all accept that the Chairman did a particularly good job. I congratulated him on that. It was a long three days for him to sit there. However, there were times when I felt the Chairman was not as impartial as he should have been. At times, he interjected when he, as the Chairman, should have remained silent. In fact, had you counted the number of minutes that the Chairman used himself in the three days that we were in the Estimates Committee, you will find that he would have consumed a significant amount of time. I thought that was something that the Chairman could address himself at a later date. Maybe he should buy Joske’s book on how to chair committees, and read through that and learn a few things about the art of managing a committee.
The Leader of Government Business said that he expected that the opposition would have a tag team of sorts to sit in the Estimates Committee to interrogate ministers as they came through. Why did he anticipate that? We had a strong team of 10 people who were prepared to work hard and support each other to look at this budget thoroughly. It does not matter if his past experience in this Chamber reminded him that, whenever the CLP government was being quizzed about the budget, there was usually one opposition spokesman standing on this side of the Chamber asking the minister on the other side. We had a strong team who were all equally interested in all the different portfolios and were prepared to spend the time supporting each other, providing questions and supplementary questions for the ministers.
It is important for the Deputy Chief Minister to understand that, here he is trying to bring a better system, so he says, believing that the old system was bad, and then somehow saying: ‘We have to throw it out; we will not use that as a benchmark’ yet, in the same breath saying: ‘We have to compare it with what the CLP did’. I thought the old system was reasonably okay, but the estimates system can be improved and made more efficient. I believe that the time that is allowed for estimates is insufficient. Unless written responses are provided earlier, this is going to be the way it will continue next time around. Once the written responses were provided to me last night, I had the opportunity to sit there, read them and digest the answers.
I was a bit put out when I found that several of the answers which included references to charts and other attachments, were missing those attachments. It made the responses incomplete and I could not consider those answers in any aspect whatsoever. It was not until this morning that a whole swag of papers then arrived literally on my lap for me to consider, when I had other issues to deal with at the same time. It is important that, when responses are provided to the shadow minister for consideration, that the full set of documentation is provided. I am sure the government will now take it on board for future reference.
The Estimates Committee, the core members of the PAC, have indeed worked very hard since June when we went to Tasmania to look at a system that was considered to be good. We came back pretty unanimous on what we wanted to see happen here. I recall, very clearly, that government members were interested in having two committees running in parallel for the duration of three or four days. Some of us were not interested in having two committees running in parallel because we wanted to be present right through the whole estimates process, and having two committees means we had to literally make a choice as to which committee we sit on. Some of us recommended that the committee process took at least the full five days of the week during which we could interrogate all ministers. However, that was not to be and we have what we have today.
What happened then is we have 1 ministers not interrogated through the public hearings system. Some of the responses to our questions are inadequate, and I am certain the answers to the Health minister and to Minister for Infrastructure, Planning and Environment would also be found wanting and needed supplementary questions. This is where, I believe, had the written answers been provided earlier, we could have moved through the process fairly quickly, determine what needed to be pursued, and supplementary questions put to those to get to the core of the whole issue. That would have made the whole process a lot better.
It has been learning curve for all of us. There are better ways of doing things. This is not a good way. Running out of time was really the most unfortunate aspect of the whole exercise for the three days. I would prefer the Chairman to be a little more impartial than he has been. Once those rough edges are ironed out, I believe things will be a lot better.
Mr MALEY: Mr Chairman, I would like to place on the record some of my comments and observations in relation to the budget Estimates Committee process. I can say that, in a very general way to begin with, in my view, the committee system and the process which we endured over the past three days is a form of empowering parliament, and enhances the very concept of parliamentary democracy. It is a very good mechanism which the Territory community, through their members of parliament, can scrutinise the Territory budget. I would like to say all the members who contributed - there are a few exceptions - should be congratulated for their hard work. There was a huge amount of effort that went into the drafting of the questions and almost as much, it seems, into drafting many of the answers.
The budget Estimates Committee is an important safeguard, and one which should be cherished and refined so that the most benefit can be derived from the system. Unlike some of the behaviour in this Chamber, most of the time, the Estimates Committee was conducted in an efficient manner and many of the people involved behaved in a statesman-like manner. The only difficulty, of course, is that the time restraints placed on the committee made it impossible to really go through every single facet of the budget. It made it impossible to test many of the important aspects of the 2002-03 budget. There seems to have been a systemic failure of the committee process, boiling down to a lack of time.
Another concern was that there seemed a lack of interest and any real contribution made by the backbenchers of the current government. Backbenchers are all too often reluctant to speak up against the government and its ministers as this may create the impression of some party disunity, and that person then, of course, reduces their chances of becoming a minister or leader. What occurs then is an executive government and not parliamentary government, since the executive, of course, control the purse strings. They make all the decisions, and it is viewed, certainly historically and from a political science perspective, as an unhealthy system.
I am not going to repeat the comments made by the member for Katherine. I can confirm, certainly from my perspective in the shadow portfolios for which I am responsible for - with the vote both for the Department of Justice and also relating to the Department of Business, Industry and Resource Development - that there were many, many questions which were left unasked. I appreciated many of the detailed answers I received. However, I was not afforded an opportunity, on behalf of the Northern Territory people, to ask further questions and really scrutinise the budget in detail.
I suppose this review of the budget Estimates Committee falls within the scope of an agenda which I am promoting for a general parliamentary review. There has to be a greater and more efficient role for the backbenchers of the government, and an opportunity afforded to the opposition to test these type of processes and to enhance the budget situation. We should continually try to find ways to reform and renew our particular parliamentary democracy.
Politics must be about policies, not personalities. It should be about issues, not sound bites, and it should relate to a substance, not spin. There comes a time where, unfortunately, human nature being what it is, some ministers start believing there own rhetoric. I was, as a Deputy Chairman, particularly concerned to hear a report from the member for Nelson - who is a good and decent man and a person I have known most of my adult life - on the subject of what could loosely be described as the threatening, bordering on abusive, manner by the Deputy Chief Minister. That is really disgraceful and the lowest point that was reached during of the course of the Estimates Committee. It shows clearly that, by singling out such a good and decent man for that type of abuse, that person has no regard for the role and view of backbenchers and other members of this parliament. He is a person who is in the process of believing some of his own rhetoric.
Backbenchers and you, Mr Chairman, touched upon the performance of the Chairman of the committee. I can say, in a very general way, that I thought that the committee was run in a fairly efficient and fair manner. However, once again there was, from the Chair, this lack of confidence of offending some of the executive and ministers who were before the committee perhaps, and that may have had an effect on the way that some of things were said, criticising the process, as opposed to being a genuine part of a parliamentary democracy. A person who is not part of the corporate entity, be it in government, or be it a backbencher in government, should be in a position to have the confidence to say what he thinks, to behave fairly, and not have to fear retribution of the form that the member for Nelson had to clearly endure from the Deputy Chief Minister.
The process is certainly on the way to being a good one and, with some fair and objective reforms, it is really going to advance, in my view, the scrutiny of the entire budgetary process. I support the committee system; I support a comprehensive review; and I support, without going into details, an extension of the current system. Questions are provided to the executive. If answers are going to be provided, then there should be sufficient time to read them, to properly formulate supplementary questions. In the course of preparing my questions, I had an opportunity to read the Hansard from previous debates in this House which were not hamstrung by limitations on time. It was fairly obvious that, although some of the questions were well worded and work had gone into them. they were merely parroted out. An answer was given and, clearly, the person asking the question did not have the understanding - it seemed on many occasions - to ask that supplementary question to properly test the budget, and the member of parliament who is in that executive position who is really the government. That is the real difference and, probably, the real reason why this particular opposition utilised so much time, because there is a real capacity to have a follow-up question. That capacity did not exist and that is evident from the Hansard, from the last serious budget, when the now government, were in opposition.
With those comments, Mr Deputy Chairman, I look forward to the review occurring and next year, being in a position to endorse totally the revised and reformed process.
Ms CARNEY: Mr Deputy Chairman, I will be brief. I wanted to record a couple of things, because I thought I probably should in the circumstances. I wanted to endorse wholeheartedly the comments and suggestions made by the member for Katherine. I plan to do so and to comment on a couple of other things, in a similar tone.
As a new politician, I found the process absolutely fascinating. I, strangely, enjoyed it; I thought it was very interesting. I cannot say that I have ever really got into budgets or balance sheets. I am the type of person who, in business, simply rang the accountant to ask whether I was making money or not. So, for me, the learning curve has really been extraordinary. To that extent, I am very grateful for this opportunity.
In relation to the process generally, I thought it was good. As a new member of parliament, I am not terribly interested in what has happened in the past. In fact, I do not give a toss. I am interested in where we go from here. As I said, the process was generally good.
I pick up briefly a couple of things that the Chief Minister mentioned. Having sat there for a lot of the time - and I think I was there for probably between 80% to 90% of the time - I did not think that the questioning was aggressive. I did not think that public servants were given a hard time, nor did I think the atmosphere was venomous. I thought that the public servants were treated with courtesy by both sides. Occasionally, people would forget to ask questions through the minister. It seemed, from my observations, that that was just human nature coming into it. When you are essentially having dialogue with someone, it is very difficult to then look the other way and direct your question around the corner, as it were. From my observations, I did not see anything deliberate or wrong with the way members asked questions, occasionally, inadvertently to public servants. I thought we all did the best we could in the circumstances. I did not think any member was perfect - none of us were perfect. It really was a ‘suck it and see’ exercise: new government, new opposition, new process.
For my part, I was decidedly unhappy that I was unable to ask supplementary questions in one shadow portfolio in particular; that was Correctional Services. In relation to tourism, that is an enormous portfolio and I was terribly disappointed that I had to chop down an enormous number of supplementary questions. I do not know how many I asked, but it would have been no greater than six or seven. I recall that, when we were having this debate in the parliament only a few weeks ago, I said that I was concerned that I would have between, and I quote: ‘20 to 40 minutes with the minister for Tourism’. The Deputy Chief Minister said, in his reply, and I quote: ‘No one is suggesting you only have 30 minutes or 40 minutes’ with him. I think I had 25 minutes, so my prediction turned out to be right and, to that extent, it was terribly disappointing.
I found the conduct of the government pretty dreadful last night, in changing the goalposts. Changing the goalposts in any exercise invariably gets up my nose, and it certainly did. It seemed to me that the government knew that its system was going pear-shaped and it used political spin, political opportunism, to blame the opposition. The letter was inflammatory. It was provided to the Chairman of the committee who did not, even as a matter of courtesy, discuss the matter with his committee colleagues. That was unconscionable in my view. It was clearly political, and that was, for me, the most disappointing part of the entire process …
Mr Stirling: So you didn’t want the answers. Okay. We won’t do that in future.
Ms CARNEY: … especially when one considers that the Hansard will show this forever and a day - when you have finished, Deputy Chief Minister - that one question was ruled inadmissible. Out of all of the time that I spent there, I cannot recall any question being objected to on the basis of relevance. This is something that the government will have to live with.
I noticed the Chairman’s cricket analogies. I am a great cricket fan - described as a cricket tragic - and so I will follow his analogy. Objectively, my observations were that the opposition played with a straight bat and then, mid-way through the game, the rules were changed, and that was the only disappointing part of the exercise. Of course, the conduct of the Deputy Chief Minister in terms of his discussions with the member for Nelson was also unconscionable.
Mr Stirling: As was your behaviour last night. You went within an inch of being thrown out, and you should have been!
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: Order!
Ms CARNEY: When you’ve finished, Deputy Chief Minister.
Mr Stirling: You should have been thrown out of that Chamber. Your behaviour was disgraceful because you had been drinking and you cannot handle it. You should not drink in future.
Ms CARNEY: How dare you accuse me of that! I …
Mr BALDWIN: A point of order, Mr Deputy Chairman!
Mr Stirling: You could smell it! I was 15 feet away!
Mr BALDWIN: A point of order, Mr Deputy Chairman! The Leader of Government Business has just accused my colleague of drinking, and I would ask you to ask him to withdraw that.
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: I ask the Deputy Chief Minister to withdraw.
Mr STIRLING: Why should I, if it is a fact?
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: I think you should withdraw. You should not make any personal reference to anybody in this Chamber.
Mr STIRLING: Well, her behaviour was unconscionable.
Mr BALDWIN: How do you know she had been drinking? Prove it.
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: You should not do that. Now, please withdraw.
Mr STIRLING: I will withdraw, Mr Deputy Chairman.
Mr Baldwin: So you should.
Ms CARNEY: Thank you, Mr Deputy Chairman. It is really unfortunate that the Deputy Chief Minister becomes very excited when some pressure is put on. That is a matter for him; he is the one who needs to sleep well at night. I know how well I sleep.
Getting back to the matters at hand, as a new member of parliament, as I said at the outset, I did find the process fascinating and I look forward to the government having the good grace to pick up on some of the very sensible suggestions made by the member for Katherine.
Mr WOOD: Mr Deputy Chairman, one could start off in cricketing terms and say bad light stopped play, but otherwise, I shall continue.
I thank all members for the tenor of tonight. I was not actually going to speak. I thought we were going to have a great sparring match but, in general there has been a lot of support for the process, and I need to put it on record as well. I congratulate the government. I have said it before that I think the Estimates Committee is a great idea. It is very important that we keep this process going, but we have to be aware that it is a public process and I am mindful of the some of the changes that we were looking at. For instance, without getting into the argument of not enough time, one of the dangers of bringing in a whole pile of questions and then just basically saying that they are all answered and they go to Hansard, is that you take away the ability of the public - and that could just be the media; it may not be anyone - to be able to hear that question.
The other day, I was reading Warren Snowdon’s contribution to the debate on stem cells. He was complaining that, at his stage of the debate, he had been asked to go to the committee rooms and the problem was the committee rooms was that it was not being broadcast. He said the very same thing: only those who will bother to go and pick up the Hansard will every know what he said whereas, if he could be broadcast it, there was a fair chance that people would hear it. The one thing we have to watch in all this debate, no matter if we want three hours or 23 hours or 230 hours, is that it should be there for the public, not us. It is important for us, but it should be there for the public and that should be the key.
Some of the problems that we have had in the last few days have resulted because this system is new; it is different from the past. I agree with the member for Araluen: I really do not care too much about the past. It is important to some extent, but we have moved on to a far more public process. We now include members of departments - CEO’s and advisors - and that is great. It also gives us a chance to ask them questions directly, which a lot of times you would never be able to do. It is a learning curve for the government. They are now in a process where they have to be able to answer questions that come back from the other side. They are also learning the process themselves, because it is a new government. Also we are dealing with a new type of budget, an accrual budget - maybe I should call it a cruel budget, because for some of us it has been that - but it is a process we are all learning and, therefore, there are going to be some hiccups.
If I may make some small suggestions; I realise there is likely to be a review. There are two things that stood out in my mind about how we could reduce the amount of time spent. There was a series of questions of the opposition, which were standard questions for every department, and you would see them there as you go through. There either needs to be a way of actually being able to read those particular questions, and have multiple answers according to the departments - maybe that is one way to do it. Where you have these basically standard questions to each department, maybe there is some way we could combine those. There may be a chance to look at combining questions. If I had a question - and it happened on a couple of occasions – it might have been close to a question someone else had. Perhaps we could actually bring questions together and say they are on behalf of two, three or four people, and then supplementaries could come from each person. There is room for working on that part of it. Also, in replies to questions. At times, instead of a minister saying: ‘A, B, C, D, $100, $200, $300, $400, end of question’, there would be a preamble that would say what a wonderful job the government is doing, how beautiful the sky is, what a lovely day it is. Sometimes there was a bit too much extra added to the question that really did not need to be there. We could tighten it up on both sides and, talking as an experienced waffler here, I should know.
The other thing is that there was some talk about behaviour. I am not judging anyone in this particular matter, but last night I almost felt ashamed to be a politician. I thought last night’s behaviour on both sides was woeful - just straight out woeful. I am not making judgments on either side, but I reckon, when you have the public and members of departments there, so close to you, they must have thought we were low lives. If we cannot have a decent debate without getting to the extent we did last night, we can only blame ourselves if people think politicians are not the greatest people on this earth. If we are going to make a better parliament by having a look at an Estimates Committee, and if we are thinking we are improving things, perhaps we have to improve our behaviour. By all means, good vigorous debate, I have no problem with that. However, last night at 11.30 pm, I thought it was fairly atrocious. I just could not believe what was going on. I hope that can be part of the review: that we try to do things a little better and a little more civilly.
I enjoyed it as well. The member for Araluen said it was a learning curve. I actually found it great. I did not get bored. I am disappointed that the questions had to be put into a shortened period, and we could not speak on them all, but I was learning. It might have been 14 hours for the Treasurer, but I must admit, listening to the advice that she was giving, I started to learn about the budget process and about matters - I am like the member for Araluen, I really could not care too much about budgets. I want to learn, because it means I do a better job as a parliamentarian. It is certainly an educational thing, especially for new members.
I would like to put on record my thanks to a lot of people. There have been some comments about the Chairman. Mr Chairman of the committee, I might have some minor complaints about things but, overall, I thought you did a great job. People sometimes say: ‘Well you said a few things in a biased manner’; well you happen to be a member of a party. It is probably a good reason for having independent Speakers, but so what?
A member: They want him to be a Liberal.
Mr WOOD: Is he? Oh, right.
I thought you did a very good job, and that is not sucking up to you, Mr Chairman, but I think you did.
Dr Burns: Thank you, I do too.
Mr WOOD: I would also like to thank all the public servants. There is one sitting over in the corner. I am told you are not allowed to name them. Thanks for the amount of work they must have done in answering all the questions. It was hard enough, sometimes, writing the questions, so I suppose it must have been worse trying to answer them. To Terry Hanley and Ros Vogeli, to all the Hansard staff and all the Assembly staff as well. I would also like to thank my half of a research officer. I probably should call her Loz, and the Speaker can call her Davies. I thank her for the work she has done in helping to prepare questions.
Overall, it has been great. I should make one other comment: I have enjoyed the rapport between myself, as a member of the committee, and different ministers. I make an example of the Deputy Chief Minister, as the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. There were some questions about the possibility of teacher training. You can have that toing and froing in this process, and it does make you feel as though you can have some input into government policy. If they do not agree with you, they are certainly going to tell you. There were times when the minister believed some of the ideas I put forward were of merit, and that at least makes you feel that you are of some benefit in this process, and I think that is great.
So, all in all, all right, there are some hiccups in it. I do believe we need a longer time period, there is no doubt about that. I went to Tasmania, I saw the system. Far better to have extra time and a bit left over, than not enough time, because the public will have confidence in it. We get complaints that we do not work here long enough. Four days one week and three days the next week, so what? That is what we get paid for; I cannot see a great problem with that. I would like to see it out of the sittings. It is much better out of the sittings. We do the sittings some other time, even it is only sit for a day just to fix up the bits and pieces at the beginning and the end. I would like to put it on record permanently. It was good, I enjoyed the process, I just think we need some refining, and one of the major refinements is that there is some extra time.
Mr BALDWIN: Mr Deputy Chairman, I agree with a lot of what the member for Nelson has said. There have been a lot of good suggestions in the debate on the report here tonight. Certainly my colleague, the member for Katherine, put forward some suggestions. It is quite good to see those come through and that there is willingness on both sides - or on three sides with the member for Nelson - to work to a resolution. The process that has been started can be refined quite considerably to provide a better outcome.
I pick up on one thing the member for Nhulunbuy talked about. It rang a warning bell for me when he said he did not like to have all these members sitting opposite him or the other ministers asking questions. That sounds like – sound like, does not quite taste like yet - he may be thinking of restricting the number of members who can ask questions of ministers. That would be a crying shame for the process that has begun. Perhaps it is intimidating for ministers sitting there having questions fired at them, but that was no different to the other process that we had in place in this House. I would be most uncomfortable if that happened; that members were restricted in any way, shape or form, from having the ability to ask questions - all sitting there at their leisure to ask those questions. If that is the line he is thinking well, then, it raises the question of what he would do to an Independent member to give equal time that he may restrict to members of the opposition. Perhaps you will end up just having slotted times where you can appear and that would be a terrible thing, I am sure. The Leader of the Opposition also talked about the hours once again. We have heard these arguments. I am not going to dwell on them, except to say this issue was raised extensively in the debate leading up to the formation of this Estimates Committee. I guess it is fair to say that, for this estimates at least, we have 10 very …
Mr Stirling: If you are referring to me, I am not the Leader of the Opposition.
Mr BALDWIN: The Leader of Government Business, sorry, you just remind me of the Leader of the Opposition when …
Mr Stirling: You are the opposition.
Mr BALDWIN: We have 10 very experienced members on this side, and he was quoting the last few budget debates in this House: 28 hours and all of those statistics. We have eight members on this side who have been in government; five who have been in executive government, so why wouldn’t we have the ability to raise many questions and know the workings of government?
The Leader of Government Business also referred a time when there was 41 hours in 1996 and 41-odd hours in 1997. I t is far from me to say, but those were the days when Mr Bell, Mr Bailey and - I think from memory, both those years or perhaps one, but I think both – Mr Parish were in this House. Albeit what they were saying was sometimes hard to take, they were very hard workers and scrutinised the budget very extensively, and with quite a bit of experience in the case of, certainly, Mr Bell and Mr Bailey. That may account, you would assume, for those longer periods there of 41-odd hours. So, we are not asking any different to that sort of consideration.
The Chief Minister also thanked the public servants, and I do also for the hard work they have put into this. I know the sort of work they are put through when they get these amounts of questions. I am glad that they were there, in fact, because a number of times we saw where ministers could not answer questions - and this is the process - and they had to turn to those officers to get the required answers, and they did so. The public servants, obviously, very professionally provided the information as they could. But that was a time consuming process, as it has been pointed out. The Chief Minister also apologised to them. Well, I think that is a bit cynical. I do not recall any of us attacking the public servants. In fact, all of us have great respect for those public servants and the job they do, particularly in the environment of a budget estimates process, or review, as in the past.
She also mentioned the venomous atmosphere, and I do not recall it being any more venomous than what we used to go through from them when they were in opposition and we were on that side going through the questioning. Repetition was mentioned, and I do not recall the Chairman pulling us up on repetition or, indeed, ruling out any questions that were not relevant.
As I said, the process does need some refinement and that, I am sure, we are going to get into at a later stage. The point that the member for Nelson is a very good one, but just recapping a little. That is, when the Leader of Government Business brought the answers to the questions in, looking for some way of showing that their process was going to work, because we had been spending some time quizzing, which he was not happy with, and we were getting some good issues up - and I will get to that in a moment. However, I agree with the member for Nelson in the fact that this is a public process. That is what the government, when they were in opposition, used to talk about as the most utmost plank of having an Estimates Committee: that the public could come in and listen to a question being asked and then listen to the answer being given. The problem with just providing the answers - and I have no problem with the answers being provided because it then allows more information to flow and more questions to be raised arising from those answers, and more answers given; so we provide more information to the public. But if you just incorporate, then that ability for the public to come in and understand and enjoy the questioning and the answering would be taken away. There should be some consideration, if that is going to happen, to somehow reading the question or a version of the question, and an answer being given before going on.
I assume that, perhaps, an apology has been given to the member for Nelson by the Leader of Government Business for talking to him in the way he did - the response from the member for Nelson being that he felt threatened, in his own words. Because the member for Nelson did not raise it himself just now in his contribution to this debate, I assume that an apology has been given and accepted - and I am glad, if that is the case. It was uncalled for, and fairly lousy, I think.
So when we did have time, in the early parts of the process, to inquire into this budget in some depth, we found out all sorts of interesting things. That is the type of good information that I am sure people are interested in. We found out fairly early on that there was a certificate of exemption given to Hawker Britton which was the company that conducted the Labor Party’s election campaign. We could not have it tabled, unfortunately, because I know - and the Attorney-General would know, because I think procurement sits with him now - that when you sign off on a C of E, there are two ministers involved: the one supporting the C of E and the one who has to give the final sign off. The reasons are given quite explicitly on that C of E as to why this company is the best for the job. It could well be that that C of E explains it very well. If it does, well, there is obviously nothing to hide. It would have been good to have a copy of that C of E, but we were not able to. That was an interesting piece of information coming out reasonably early.
Likewise, the two lecterns that were shipped up here at the expense of taxpayers because the Chief Minister felt she had to have matching lecterns. Other things such as we know now we cannot trust the time lines that are in Building a Better Territory. A few of those time lines have been tested now and are falling way and woefully behind schedule. We found out that cash estimates and the actuals were not available, even though the Budget Overview said that they were. Not only that, on a couple of minor occasions we were given the cash comparable figures so, obviously, they were available, but just given to us when it suited the government. That came out reasonably early, as well.
We also found that some departments, the ones that we inquired into in depth, under spent in 2001-02 and that the under spend was carried forward to some varying degrees in 2002-03. Some of the money lapsed, which is a nice way of saying Treasury gets hold of, it I guess. We also found that a couple of the departments overspent and transacted more cash than they had at hand, and they carried forward, indeed, a deficit cash component. That, perhaps, is worthy of some further inquiry.
We also found there are some mistakes in the budget papers - quite glaring mistakes. In fact, the longer we went into it, the more and more we found. Some of them are quite considerable amounts. The Chief Minister was very coy about answering whether or not she could confirm that these budget books were, indeed, valid without mistake. We found very many of those. The solution to that has been offered up, and it will be good to see that solution taken up by the government.
We found that 15 roadside inns are going to lose subsidy money. Then we inquired a bit further and asked whether that was 27 roadside inns, because that is what the web site said. When I, in fact …
Dr BURNS: You would know where they all are.
Mr BALDWIN: Yes I do, most of them are in my electorate. You would not know where they are.
When I tried to assist the minister for Licensing, when he had, not only the Commissioner of Taxation but also the Director of Licensing at the table with him - and it could have been one question, one quick answer - he refused to do that. That is all right, it is just going to cause more work for the Commissioner of Taxation, which is unfortunate, but there you have it.
We also learnt that there have been cuts to the Primary Industry and Fisheries budget - quite significant cuts, and particularly quite massive cuts into our research farms. In their budgets, 18% cuts to the research farms, that is fairly critical. We find out that one of the ways that they are going to live with those cuts is that they are going to sell their produce and collect the revenues from that. Well, anyone who has been in farming will know that that is a dicey thing to put in a budget: to say: ‘Here, boys, we are going to take some money off you; you go out and make your own way on a research farm basis, and see if you can build up your cash by selling your produce’. I wish them luck. I know they are very capable people on those research farms and, if they have to, will find a way. We also know that there have been a number of jobs lost in the DPIF area - 38 we established, just in that area alone. There are 38 jobs gone …
A member: DBIRD.
Mr BALDWIN: In the Primary Industry area of DBIRD. When I inquired into those, I was accused of accusing the minister of saying that those people had been done away with. That was not my interest, I just wanted to know how many were not there that were supposed to be there. Perhaps the minister might, while he is slashing budgets and cutting the jobs in the Primary Industry and Fisheries area, he might like to give back the two DLOs that are in his office. The two of them, I am sure could be used quite handily out in the department, rather than having to do his work up in the office, particularly with the numbers dwindling throughout that whole agency.
The other thing we learnt is that the government is going to – or may - may trial cotton in the Daly Basin. The minister refused to give an undertaking to disallow that happening. That is within his power, that is his right, but I find that very unfortunate that he would not do that, because that is of grave concern to me, if we allow the trialling. Indeed, in the minister’s words: ‘… the trialling to establish the commercial viability of cotton in the Daly Basin region’, is just amazing that we are going to let that happen.
On Port Keats’ pool, I have an answer from the minister - very disappointing. This is one of the things about answers, that you have to live with them. I am not sure people at Port Keats are going to be very happy about this. I asked the minister responsible for the Department of Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs whether the money that had been promised for the Palumpa rodeo arena was going to be granted in this year’s budget, and the answer I got was ‘No’. However, I am aware that promise was made by the candidate for Daly. I noticed that he was up there – no, he is gone - giving you people the support you deserve. It is a pity he is not here. Government is going to actually honour the promise for the rodeo arena at Palumpa but, in the term of government. The fact is that, when the election was on, the arena was being talked about. It is nearly been completed and they are still waiting for their $15 000, which was promised by the candidate. It talks about no amount of money: ‘No specific funding was promised’. Well, that is a promise and you have agreed to that, that is good.
The same promise was made at the same time, for the $300 000 for the Wadeye community. The answer I get when inquiring into that is: ‘The $300 000 was paid to the council in 2000 and 2001. There is no further funding to be provided in 2002-03’. Well, let me remind you on that side, that the funding in 2000 and 2001 was in their bank accounts well before the election. Then, along came your candidate during the election, and promised another $300 000, and you have to honour that. So, Chief Minister, that is another one you have to honour. I would be glad if you could ask your Minister for Community Development if he will have another look at that because, as you know, they are keen to get on with that job and have it completed. In fact, the $300 000 would make sure, at the end of the day, it is a very worthy construction.
Mr Chairman, having run out of time, I also congratulate all the members of the PAC, the Hansard, government officials, members opposite for doing a reasonably good job, and my own colleagues for a very good job in a process that does need refinement.
Ms CARTER: Mr Chairman, a couple of comments. I have fairly mixed feelings as to how the week has gone. I, like many, knew we were going to run out of time. I have been disappointed and I put that on the record earlier. We were not going to have the open-ended time frame that has always been available here in the Northern Territory for the examination by parliament of the budget. I know the government has used previous budget processes and debates to come up with the approximately 30 hours that we were provided with, but the week showed that that needs revision. Looking back to the past as to how those numbers came up, really did not end up being appropriate.
One of the reasons for that was the way the venue, where we had the activity, has changed. My recollection of two previous budget processes was that, here in the Chamber, you would have a few members on one side, the minister and a couple of others perhaps, on the other - maybe six or seven people at the most in the Chamber at a time - and it went along in a way of question, answer, question, answer, in that process, without too many other people interjecting or adding in supplementaries. The way the room was set up for this process was quite different. Anyone who has communications skills should have been able to pick up how, doing it the way we have done this week, was going to actually encourage people to talk. We were not having to stand up and sit down, stand up sit down, throughout the process; there was much more of a flow of information and discussion.
As we have already picked up earlier, it was somewhat disconcerting, from time to time, having to remember to put your questions through the Chair and through the minister, when you might have been talking eyeball to eyeball with one of the public servants, getting some answers from them, for example. So the way the room was set up enhanced communication which, I think, was one of the reasons why, at the start of the week, there was such a desire to actually explore the budget and to delve deeply into some of the issues that were coming up.
Also, of course, government was well aware the number of questions that the opposition had lodged was quite a significant number and were quite complex as well. There were indications along the way that the time frame was going to be inadequate. Like many of the members here, and on both sides I am sure, I found the process very interesting, as I have found it in the past. It is an excellent learning experience to be able to gather more information about what the various departments do. To that degree, it was disappointing that our ability to question ministers was reduced and that cut down on the sort of information that we were able to learn.
Personally, I was quite pleased when we were provided with the answers yesterday. Obviously, it would have been more beneficial to get them on the Tuesday, as soon as we could have, so that we could examine them more carefully. However, it was certainly very interesting to receive those answers. My area that I concentrated on was Health and I did write a number of questions for that area and ask for tables to be provided. I was very pleased with the standard of information and the complexity of those tables which were provided by the minister for Health. Her staff are to be applauded for that.
With the questions that I wrote, I did write quite a number of supplementary questions which we could not get to today. I have been able to submit them and I have been grateful for that ability. I am quite sure that the minister will get back to me with some of the answers to those important questions.
I believe that the government does owe it to us and Territorians - through the opposition because that is our job to question the budget - the ability to be able to question the budget until, basically, all of our questions have been exhausted. I hope that when the review is conducted that that sort of need is taken into very serious consideration.
I was disappointed that we were unable to get to the Minister for Lands and Planning. In my electorate of Port Darwin the issue of planning is very important, and I was keen to witness the examination of the budget area in that part and to have asked a few supplementary questions. So, that was disappointing to miss his area. He also covers a number of other very important areas, and it is a real shame that we missed out on that particular minister.
To conclude, I would like to express my thanks to the ministers - in particular the Minister for Health and Community Services and the staff who provided information over the past week. Also, special thanks to the staff of the Legislative Assembly. I have certainly been aware, over the last couple of weeks, of the extraordinary amount of work that has gone into this process. I know that they will be looking very carefully at how they can streamline the efforts that they have put in over the past few weeks. I am quite sure that the system of gathering questions and formatting them can be made simpler. I hope that next year it is not quite such an onerous task as I know it has been this year. I would also like to thank those people who must remain nameless, who assisted the opposition in the formation of some of our questions. I conclude by thanking the staff of the Leader of the Opposition’s office who have also worked very long and very hard in assisting us in the preparation of our questions for this activity.
Mr CHAIRMAN: The question is that the proposed expenditure be agreed to, and that the resolution or expressions of opinion as agreed to by the committee in relation to the proposed expenditure be noted..
Motion agreed to.
Remainder of the bill agreed to.
Bill to reported; report adopted.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bill read a third time.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent five bills entitled Taxation (Administration) Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 90), Stamp Duty Amendment Bill (No 2) 2002 (Serial 91), Debits Tax Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 92), Mineral Royalty Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 93), and Pay-roll Tax Amendment Bill (No 2) 2002 (Serial 94) passing through all stages at this sittings.
Motion agreed to.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent a bill entitled Financial Management Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 88) passing through all stages at this sittings.
Motion agreed to.
Mr STIRLING (Racing, Gaming and Licensing): Madam Speaker, I move that so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent bills entitled Gaming Control Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 82) and Gaming Machine Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 83), passing through all stages at this sittings.
Motion agreed to.
Continued from 21 August 202.
Mr REED (Katherine): Madam Speaker, the opposition will be supporting these bills and, from the point of view the details of them, there is little point in going through and repeating it, virtually in relation to what has already been advised to the House in the second reading speech.
There are a number of items which are incorporated and covered in this legislation in relation to franchises, the exemption of certain corporate reconstructions, the removal of hiring duty on wet hire, special hiring arrangements, clarifying the tax of acquisitions for partnership interests, and communication of information with Registrar of Motor Vehicles - which is an appropriate course to take in terms of advice to be provided to the Motor Vehicle Registry by the taxes office - clarifying the leases outgoings and not subject to duty, and voluntary transfers of business pursuant to the Financial Sector (Transfer of Business) Act and land rich anti-avoidance provisions. Whilst these are, in overall terms, fairly complex issues, the amendments themselves are fairly straightforward. I would ask the Chief Minister and Treasurer whether or not she could indicate to the House for those items for which it is appropriate, the level of liaison that has been undertaken with business and industry or other like interested groups, and the extent to which they may have indicated their support, or suggestions that may have been adopted in relation to this legislation.
I foreshadow that we will be, likewise, supporting the amendment schedule No 22, from the point of view of expediting the process of this legislation. Bearing in mind the work that we have been through and, in particular, the fact that Assembly staff have been working very hard over not just this week to facilitate the Estimates Committee, but leading up to that, Madam Speaker, to accord to them some fairness in not keeping them too late, the Chief Minister and Treasurer might want to consider moving the amendments as a whole, and we would be supportive of that,
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I thank the shadow Treasurer for his comments on this. These are a number of stamp duty measures, some which really are clarification, some that are responding to anomalies. The former Treasurer probably realised that a number of these things do emerge over a year, and it is an opportunity when we are doing the budget debate, to put some of those clarifications in place. A number of them have emerged from business over the year. Certainly, as far as any amendments we have in front of us tonight, either they have emerged because of those anomalies or lack of clarification in stamp duty measures, or with some we have taken the initiative of working with business - like the renewal of franchises, something that was causing considerable grief in the business community - and I know are highly welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The issues of wet hires and corporate reconstruction were also specifically raised by industry. This government is very happy to respond to that.
I thank you for your support for these. They are sensible measures; and ones that respond to business and how Territory business can go about doing their business. I thank the opposition for their support.
Motion agreed to; bills read a second time.
In committee:
Taxation (Administration) Amendment Bill (Serial 90):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
Ms MARTIN: Mr Chairman, I move that amendments contained in Schedule 22 be moved together.
Amendments agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Bill to be reported with amendments.
Stamp Duty Amendment Bill (No 2) (Serial 91):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
Ms MARTIN: Mr Chairman, I propose the following amendments to the bill. Clause 4 of the bill repeals the old stamp duty First Home Owner Concession with a threshold of $80 000, and introduces a new First Home Owner Concession with a threshold of $125 000, as well as the $1500 stamp duty Principle Place of Resident rebate. Proposed section 8C, which deals with the stamp duty Principle Place of Resident rebate, contains an incorrect reference to the First Home Owner Concession. The proposed amendment corrects this reference, and I commend this amendment to honourable members.
Amendment agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Bill to be reported with an amendment.
Debits Tax Amendment Bill (Serial 92):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.
Bill to be reported without amendment.
Mineral Royalty Amendment Bill (Serial 93):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.
Bill to be reported without amendment.
Pay-roll Tax Amendment Bill (No 2) (Serial 94):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.
Bill to be reported without amendment.
Bills reported, report adopted.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that the bills now be read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bills read a third time.
Continued from 20 August 2002.
Mr REED (Katherine): In simple terms, Madam Speaker, the opposition supports this legislation. It is a move by the government to further enhance, in their view, the legislation, and we do not have any argument with that in what it will result in. In short, the legislation is supported.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, with some surprise I say thank you to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. I suppose, with such changes to the Financial Management Act, considering what had happened in estimates, I expected that there would be some testing of what we are doing here. These are very important, so I thank the opposition for their support.
These are the first stage of changes to the Financial Management Act, and they take us from the cash framework to the accrual. There are some important changes in terminology in this part of these amendments to the Financial Management Act, changing to the word ‘allocation’ in terms of how it is defined, rather than meaning ‘gross expenditure’, but now meaning ‘what is to be provided at a whole of agency level’; and a net of agency revenue for separate categories, such as output and capital purposes. We have looked at new terminology in the act, such as ‘purpose’, that will replace ‘activity’ in how we deal with allocations. The establishment for the Central Holding Authority which replaces the previous Consolidated Revenue Account; and the CHA in future will be where the government’s central pool of funds are; and that funding payments will come from that pool. There are some very major things here. It might not look like a substantial bill but, in how we move to the future, we have left behind …
Mr Reed: We have been talking about it all week, haven’t we?
Ms MARTIN: So these initial amendments to the Financial Management Act are important in how we move to the future, and they really do underpin what this 2002-03 budget is all about. It is a line in the sand and we are moving from a previous cash framework, and how that had legislation to support it in the Financial Management Act. Now we are moving to an accrual framework - a much more transparent and sophisticated framework, and one that will really serve to focus, not what cash going to agency is about, but what our outcomes are about. That is the really exciting part of the Accrual Working for Outcomes Framework. It is not about just where cash is going, it is about what we are getting for that allocation. It is certainly much more than cash, and a much more sophisticated and appropriate mechanism as we move into the 21st century.
I know, to say again, that the move to accruals has been a difficult one for us, as the parliamentarians. I do not necessarily think it is a difficult one for Treasury. They have embraced it wholeheartedly. We will, over the next two to three years, learn to understand it a lot better, and appreciate what value it actually adds to our budgets. So with these seemingly small amendments to the Financial Management Act, we actually are moving into a new era. It is very exciting, and I am proud to be Treasurer as we do it. I thank Treasury for all the hard work in this. It might look like some small changes, but they actually are very profound. With that, I hope that we can all embrace the change.
Motion agreed to; bill read a second time.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer)(by leave): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bill read a third time.
Continued from 20 August 2002.
Mr BALDWIN (Daly): Madam Speaker, at the forefront, let me say we are not opposed to these bills going through. At the end of the day, this formalises the system that was in place; it puts it into legislation. There are some other changes within these bills that we do not oppose.
I do note, however, that payments into and out of the fund was no different in that they go through a committee, are recommended to the minister. I also note that the minister, he or she: ‘… shall approve a payment of the whole or part of a grant or refuse to approve a payment of the grant’, which was, once again, no different to the way it worked, the minister having final approval. Obviously, he must have regard to the committee’s recommendations. So this will formalise in legislation the Community Benefit Fund and needs these amendments to the Gaming Control Act and the Gaming Machine Act, and we are not opposed to them.
Mr STIRLING (Racing, Gaming and Licensing): Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Daly for his support of the bills. I want to point out that the normal program cycle would commence on 15 January 2003, with Funding Round One for 2003 in accordance with the schedule, published in the grant application guidelines as follows: Round One advertising would commence on 15 January; applications open 1 February, close 15 March; throughout April, May, applications assessed; completed by 15 June; and by 30 June, Round One approvals issued and the successful grants paid.
A similar process takes place in the latter part of the year, with Round Two advertising commencing on 1 July; 15 July applications open; 31 August close; September, October, assessment; 30 November assessment completed; and 15 December the Round Two approvals issued and the successful grants paid. So certainly, in the latter part of the year, those organisations successful under the Community Benefit Fund would appear to be receiving something of a Christmas present that close to the end of the year.
This first schedule, then, is a bit compressed because it does not fit the normal cycle. Throughout September commenced advertising; applications open; 30 October they will close; November, December for assessment; by 15 January assessment completed; and 31 January, approvals issued, with successful grants paid. That overlaps by about two weeks with the normal cycle starting for Round One in 2003 on 15 January.
I am sure the community organisations will welcome an opportunity to get funds for whatever their need is. We envisage trying to keep them down around that $5000 or under level, so that we can spread the $600 000 available throughout a full year as equitably as possible.
Madam Speaker, with those few remarks, I commend the bills to the House and I thank the opposition for their support.
Motion agreed to; bills read a second time
Mr STIRLING (Racing, Gaming and Licensing)(by leave): Madam Speaker, I move that the bills be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bills read a third time.
Mr STIRLING (Leader of Government Business): Madam Speaker, I am always paranoid about leaving this one out because I remember the former government almost missing it. I fact, I am not sure that they did not miss one time, and it might have been snuck in under the …
Madam SPEAKER: Would you just like to move the motion.
Mr STIRLING: I move that the Assembly at its rising adjourn until Tuesday, 8 October 2002, at 10 am or such other time and or date as may be set by Madam Speaker pursuant to sessional order.
Motion agreed to.
Ms MARTIN (Chief Minister): Madam Speaker, I move that the Assembly do now adjourn.
Motion agreed to; the Assembly adjourned.
PETITION
24-Hour Medical Assessment Service and 24-Hour Chemist Facility for
Palmerston and Rural Area
24-Hour Medical Assessment Service and 24-Hour Chemist Facility for
Palmerston and Rural Area
Mr MALEY (Goyder): Madam Speaker, I present a petition from 2065 petitioners praying that the 24-hour Medical assessment service be retained, and a 24-hour chemist facility be established for the Palmerston and rural area. The petition bears the Clerk’s certificate that it conforms with the requirements of standing orders. I move that the petition be read.
Motion agreed to; petition read:
- The petition of residents of Palmerston and the extended rural area of the Northern Territory draw the
attention of the House to the lack of medical and pharmaceutical facilities available on a 24-hour basis
in your rapidly growing community.
Your petitioners will therefore humbly pray that the Legislative Assembly undertake the following remedial
action:
service, allowing Palmerston and rural residents personal access to medical advice from
nurses, paramedics and registered general practitioners, or the ability to be transported
by ambulance to Royal Darwin Accident & Emergency;
2. To establish, within the Farrar Medical Facility, a 24-hour chemist facility as further support
to the 24-hour medical assessment service.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Member for Arafura
Member for Arafura
Mr STIRLING (Leader of Government Business): Madam Speaker, I move that leave of absence be granted to the member for Arafura, Ms Scrymgour, this day, on account of ill health.
Motion agreed to.
LEAVE OF ABSENCE
Leader of the Opposition
Leader of the Opposition
Mr REED (Katherine): Madam Speaker, I seek leave of absence for the Leader of the Opposition who has gone to Sydney to meet with the Prime Minister.
Motion agreed to.
APPROPRIATION BILL 2002-03
(Serial 89)
(Serial 89)
Madam SPEAKER: Honourable members, pursuant to the resolutions of the Assembly dated 20 August 2002 and 17 September 2002, the Committee of the Whole will now consider the report of the Estimates Committee and the Appropriation Bill 2002-03.
In committee:
Mr CHAIRMAN: Order! I call on the Chairman of the Estimates Committee to present the report of the committee.
Dr BURNS: Mr Chairman, I have pleasure in tabling the report of the Estimates Committee on its consideration of the estimates of proposed expenditure contained in the schedule to the Appropriation Bill 2002-03, together with the answers to questions on notice, and additional information provided to date to the committee. I advise honourable members that further additional information and answers to questions on notice will be tabled on 8 October 2002, and that the edited Hansard report of the committee’s proceedings will contain written questions and answers.
I would like to make a few brief comments and, as honourable members can tell, I am a little hoarse. I have a cold and, like others involved in the committee, I am a little tired. But I am tired and happy, because it is completed - I believe it is completed.
Members: Hear, hear!
Dr BURNS: This was a historic committee, and it was the first meeting of an Estimates Committee within the Northern Territory parliamentary structure. I was very proud to be chairman of that and, although I know others have reservations, when they look back they will be proud to have been part of this. It is an ongoing development; that is the way I see it.
There has been a lot of criticism and, no doubt, we will hear criticism of the process. Underneath all of this, I guess, has been a review of the process that has been foreshadowed, and, as a party and as a government, we are committed to improving. We set the bar high, and we will continue to look at ways in which we can improve the performance of this parliament. The many changes we have seen over the last year bear very strong testimony to that.
I do not want to get into a slanging match. I know there are going to be allegations that there was not enough time. We have been through this, in terms of the Committee of the Whole in previous years, that the average was under 30 hours. I have not counted up the hours but, at the end, it was substantially more than 30 hours that we went through this process. There was actually more time and, on a number of occasions, I allowed proceedings to go on because of breaks and various things. I tried to be as generous and as fair as I could, as a chairman of this committee. I do not want to go into the allegations of squandering time; those have been played out. We could have used our time a lot more efficiently. No doubt, the Chief Minister was on the stand giving evidence for 14 hours. At the end of the day, some would say that we ran out of time. I would contend that we probably should have evened out the time for each minister, and there would probably have been adequate time for each minister.
I felt that a lot of time was taken up within the process with members - I guess from both sides - coming to grips with accrual accounting; it is a difficult concept. We had to go through the differences between the accrual and the cash, and that took up a lot of time. I am particularly indebted to the Under Treasurer, Ms Jennifer Prince, and other officers of Treasury, making themselves available and stepping us through, in an authoritative way, accrual accounting. I know that we have a lot more to do with accrual accounting. It is going to take several years for us to bed accrual accounting down. We need to identify the assets, and I heard some very interesting evidence or information given about how far we have to go in identifying what are some unique assets in some pretty remote areas of the Northern Territory. So, that is an important issue.
I feel that we got sidetracked at times, and there was a lack of coordination on the opposition side. That was evident today when the Leader of the Opposition wanted to move on, but other members - as is their right, I am not impugning them at all - wanted to ask questions about their individual electorates. I sensed a bit of a disjunction - how is that for a word? - or a lack of agreement about how they were to proceed. There needs to be a little coordination there.
We attempted, as a government, to facilitate the process by tabling all the written answers to questions. I know there were a few answers and some tables to some of the answers missing, but it was an act on our part to try and facilitate the process. It did help the process, I believe, on the last day. That is probably something we have to look at: about the written questions, verbal questions and supplementaries. I am all for a fulsome review of the process.
To finish off, Mr Chairman, I would like to thank the team who assisted the committee - I know there has been talk of paucity of resources - particularly Terry Hanley and Ros Vogeli. They put in many, many hours, and many early mornings and weekends over the last few weeks. I know it has been a bit of a nightmare for Terry and Ros, and there have been numbers everywhere - maybe they had not ordered them the way that some members would have liked but, in all honesty, they tried to do the best job that they could, with a new process and a literal avalanche of material to deal with.
As always, I’d like to thank Hansard staff. I always think they do a fantastic job. They did spell SEEK correctly, which was a pretty good achievement.
Ms Martin: Spell what?
Dr BURNS: SEEK. That is an in-joke for the committee, you see. I thank not only Hansard staff, but all the officers throughout the department. I particularly appreciated the way in which the member for Katherine and Deputy Leader of the Opposition came in at the end of the process and very graciously, I suppose, did that. I was intent on getting the report together and getting back to parliament, but I thank the member for Katherine for his great words of thanks to officers of all departments for the way that they have worked very hard to support the process. I particularly appreciated the way in which officers, as they sat at the table with ministers, when they were given the opportunity, tried to honestly answer questions and give information. Yes, I am sure there are negatives, and I am sure they are going to be highlighted here tonight, but there were also positives. With that mixture of positives and negatives, thank you for the opportunity to chair this committee. I thank all members of the committee, particularly the core members. We all put in; we all stayed there during many long hours. The other members who came in and out and asked the questions, thank you very much, and that is all from me.
Mr Reed: Give the report.
Dr BURNS: Oh, sorry. Here is the report, and I believe there is also a dissenting report as well, Mr Chairman.
Mr CHAIRMAN: Honourable members, pursuant to the resolution of the Assembly dated 20 August 2002, the committee has before it the Appropriation Bill 2002-03, and the report of the Estimates Committee which shall be considered in the following manner: the question is that the proposed expenditure be agreed to and that the resolution, or expressions of opinion as agreed to by the committee in relation to the proposed expenditure, or outputs, be noted.
I remind honourable members that the speech time limits for this debate are as follows: ministers, leaders of the opposition and shadow ministers, 20 minutes; any other members, 10 minutes. Further, the resolution provides for a maximum period of five hours for the conduct of the debate. Accordingly, as the time is now 7 30 pm, if the debate is not concluded before 12.30 am, I will then put the question.
When the consideration of the bill and the report have been concluded and the question put, the following questions will be put forthwith without debate ‘That the remainder of the bill be agreed to’. The bill will then be reported to the Assembly.
Mr REED: Mr Chairman, I do not intend to dwell too much on the actual process. In terms of this historic occasion, it was historic in that it was the first time that this House has participated in an Estimates Committee. That was the desire of this government; they put it in place. We have just spent the last three days going through that process. It is now timely for us to consider, if this process is to continue, how we might improve it rather than dwell too much on what some of the issues were. However, I want to touch on a couple.
First of all, in terms of the time constraint, the government was advised that 30 hours would not be enough and we did - and I say ‘we’ collectively in terms of the opposition and you, Mr Chairman - work hard to try to have that time extended, bearing in mind that we were to embark on a new process and were not aware of just how that would flow, and that there were some other important factors that had to be taken into account that were not. For example, in the past, the opposition numbers have been in the order of six or seven and, as a consequence of that, question numbers were not necessarily as high nor the supplementary questions …
Mr Stirling: Big statement. There were more. In 1999, you told us there were 3000 questions.
Mr REED: It is a historical fact that there are only three or four real workers in the six or seven at any given time.
- Ms Lawrie interjecting.
In addition to that, of course, Mr Chairman, on this occasion there was the circumstance that we had you, as an Independent, who worked hard and put forward a lot of questions. Also, in addition to a minister providing the answers, there was a minister and at least one officer and, on some occasions, several officers who necessarily took up time in providing the answers. For example, in the short time that was allocated to the minister for Health this evening, she took some 12 minutes consulting officers herself, and that was without any contribution to the debate. Having heard the question, she then spoke to her officers for 12 minutes, which is time lost to the productive contribution to the debate.
All of those issues now have to be taken into account when we consider how the process can be changed to make sure that it will work effectively into the future. The government has undertaken to conduct a review of this, and I hope that the Chief Minister is serious in that intent. I would suggest, Mr Chairman, rather than the review being handed to the Public Accounts Committee, it could perhaps be made more holistic and a committee formed that might comprise the Chief Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, yourself as an Independent member, and perhaps the Speaker, so that there is a level of independence that is injected - and I speak not of you as an independent but the Speaker - into the formulation of the structure of future committees, and that the principal stakeholders are also represented on such a committee. It is but one suggestion as to how a review could be undertaken and I ask members of the House to consider it. Because if it is simply goes off to the Public Accounts Committee, we will have the policemen checking on the policemen, so to speak, in terms of the committee itself and how it should be structured. Perhaps it could be useful if we look a little more broadly at what would be an effective committee to determine the structure of the Estimates Committee and how it will operate into the future.
It is regrettable that, because of the lack of time, a substantial part of Health and some $172m of the Infrastructure, Planning and Environment were not debated at all. I dare say that is historic. I have done a bit of a search to try and find, in the Westminster system, parliaments that have passed the budget without full and thorough scrutiny of the budget through minister by minister, and I have not been able to find one. It is a most unusual circumstance. It is a very sad circumstance, and it does reflect on this House. The government can stand by the amount of time that it set aside and be rigid, but the fact is we are all going to wake up in Darwin tomorrow, God willing. We will be here and would have been able to again present ourselves tomorrow to continue the debate and to be able, on behalf of those people who we represent in this Chamber - we do not represent ourselves our parties here, it is much bigger than that; we represent the people of the Northern Territory. The people of the Northern Territory deserve to be sure in the knowledge that full scrutiny is applied to the budget
It is the most important legislation that passes through this House on an annual basis. It formulates the direction of the Northern Territory. It is not the government’s legislation; it is the people’s legislation, and it is the people’s money that the government is spending. It does the government little good to say: ‘You wasted time’. I take up the example of: ‘Well, you spent four hours …’ or whatever ‘… on a couple of million dollars appropriation to the Auditor-General or the Ombudsman’. Well, so what? The fact is that we were seeking answers to questions that we considered to be important. The basis of the Westminster system is the ability of respective members of this House to be able, on behalf of their constituents and Territorians collectively, to ask what questions these members, individually, consider appropriate in their undertaking of the scrutiny of the budget.
If that offends the government – we are not here to ask questions of the government that they like or that they will be happy with. We are here to scrutinise the budget to the best ability of individual members and, in the case of the opposition, the CLP members of this parliament. That happens to be a fundamental foundation of democracy and, if this parliament is going to start to slip away from those principles and traditions, then were in a sad state of affairs.
So, I hope that the Chief Minister will seriously consider means by which we can effectively re-assess the Estimates Committee process, and make sure that next year we - albeit using what we have done this week as the model, the base structure - improve it to the extent that it will work, and that it will work effectively and will give, without any concern to individual members, a full opportunity for them to ask the questions that they consider appropriate, and to afford them an opportunity to get good answers from them.
My calculations on the public sessions that we have just been through are that, in fact, it did not take 30 hours of questioning. There were 28 hours and 18 minutes, once you exclude meal breaks, mini-breaks and when committee when into deliberative session. Of course, that does not take into account how much time disappeared with the consultations between ministers and advisors. As I say, that took some 11 or 12 minutes with the minister for Health. I do not criticise the minister for health for consulting with her advisors; that is an appropriate thing for her to do. But, it is simply another consideration that we have to take into account: that it is something that must be done, so if it has to be done, we have to make allowance for it in the global times that are set for the committee to sit, and for it to be able to work effectively. If we do not do that, we are all going to be left wanting in terms of the process that we will put in place next year.
As far as the members of the opposition are concerned, with the work that they undertook, it was a very thorough process with many questions. We dedicated over a week to formulating the questions. The government set the date and time by which questions should lodged. We had every question lodged an hour before the deadline that was set. We did that, mindful of the fact that, if we are going to put in place a process, then we should give it every chance of succeeding; and we gave that our best shot. In terms of meeting that first deadline, we did it. We had in mind also, of course, that once we passed those questions on to the secretary of the committee, he and his staff had a lot of work to do in getting them on to agencies; and the agencies had to find the answers to the questions and get them back to the committee secretariat for us then to be able to deliberate on them.
There, also, is a very important consideration that we have to take into account when looking at the structure of the next committee. Let us not just look at how it impacts on us as members of parliament and the activity that we undertake to make it work, but let us look at the impact that it has on the secretariat, and also the public servants, who have to work hard to provide us with the base information and the logistics to be able to pursue the process; because, if we ignore them, then the committee process itself is not going to work. We should expand our vision of the Estimates Committee process to include the whole process: from the opposition’s - and you, as an Independent, Mr Chairman - point of view in getting the questions ready; track that through the secretariat; through the respective government agencies and the ministers; and then into the committee process itself. If we do not do that, it will be a system that is again doomed to fail.
I hope that the government does not rigidly stick to the 30 hour rule In fairness to them, in approaching the establishment of this first Estimates Committee, they set a time limit. I hope though that, in setting that time limit, they are gracious enough, if you like, or have sufficient understanding that more time is needed because of the process. Whilst, in determining that 30 hours, they struck an average, we did indicate that an average was not appropriate. Whilst 30 hours might have been considered to be appropriate, we pointed out on a number of occasions that, on at least two years - 1996 and 1997 - the debate that occurred in this House under the former regime ran for over 41 hours. That should have been an indication to the government that 30 hours would not have been enough. But they made a decision, and they have stuck by it. I hope that they are now big and hairy enough to be able to appreciate that more time will be needed in the future to provide full and open scrutiny of the budget, if we are going to effectively represent the people of the Northern Territory. That is a point that is salient to the whole issue.
In terms of other aspects of the issues beyond shadow spokespersons, or shadow ministers’ responsibilities, the other thing that suffered today - perhaps with the exception of yourself to some extent, Mr Chairman - was the ability for members of parliament beyond their responsibilities as opposition spokesman for various portfolios, to be able to pursue issues on their electorates. There were very few of those issues that were able to be pursued effectively. Some were, in a very scant way, over the last few days, but members, by and large, have not had a big opportunity to be able to ask questions that relate to their electorates and their constituents. That is a huge shortcoming in what this process has been about and what it should be about. That is another factor that we should take into account.
Also whilst access was provided for reporting by the media, it seems to me that the venue that the Estimates Committee was held in was inadequate from the media’s and, certainly, our own point of view. The room is too small. With regard to the media, it might be more appropriate next year to consider providing them with perhaps on-line computers where they can work and be able to prepare their reports. Given that many of them did sit there for hours themselves, if we are going to have effective reporting by the media of the Estimates Committee process, then we should do what we can to facilitate that. That is another aspect of where the media have to be better catered for.
Regarding the venue, I do not know what you would do in terms of another venue, apart from using this Chamber in a restructured way, which would be rather an onerous task. However, I do not think that room was appropriate. It was appropriate for this occasion in the first year, but to go back into that venue and try and make it work, is difficult. There are constraints on the space that is available, in terms of table space for documents - necessarily, we all have a lot of documents - and there are constraints and difficulties in the public access. I spoke to a number of people who came along to have a look and, whilst many did come in and sit down and have a look, many just felt confronted. They had to walk through the door and there were all these people sitting there and, if it was not confrontational, they certainly felt that they were imposing on the proceedings. We should be encouraging more people to come along and making it easier for them to do so. If we cannot facilitate that, well, what is the use of this process? That is a very important consideration and it expands on that horizon that I was talking about earlier: let us look much more broadly than our tunnel vision of what the Estimates Committee is - sitting in a room and asking questions of the government. Let us look at both sides of the lead-in and the lead-out in how it should be organised, and undertake a full assessment of the people who have to access the venue - be they ministerial advisers, members of the public, the media or, of course, agency representatives and officers - because it all adds up in the end to the effectiveness of the process.
I take this opportunity in closing, to again thank the secretariat and the members of the PAC. They were on uncharted waters, so to speak, in going into this process. Generally speaking, it went as well as could be expected. The Chairman of the committee, Dr Burns, in overall terms conducted the proceedings as best as you could expect on a first-off basis, and I thank him for his forbearance and cooperation on a number of occasions. I also thank Mr Hanley in the secretariat, and the Hansard staff who will be working for a long time after we have stopped talking about this to finalise all the reports and to provide us with the Hansards and the longer-term records to which we will be able to refer. The officers of departments and ministers and ministerial staff, I thank for their assistance. I hope that, in overall terms, the government is big enough to recognise some of the shortcomings, to put aside the expressions of concern and any nastiness that they may have in relation to a view that too much time was taken, and just appreciate the fact that it is a democratic process and the opposition is charged with the responsibility to scrutinise the budget.
That is what we did. Perhaps even starting with a little time last Monday or not having lost the two hours on Tuesday morning, and going a bit later tonight or into tomorrow, this whole process could have been completed and we would have been able to do it without much of an extension of time. We would have been able to have a much better outcome. However, on the bright side, let us take into consideration all of the issues that I have raised. I hope that the government will do it in an understanding and a productive way, so that the process that we put in place next year will work the way that we all want it to.
Members: Hear, hear.
Ms MARTIN: Mr Chairman, I am slightly taken aback, I think, by the speech by the Deputy Opposition Leader. It was a very gracious speech tonight and one that looked constructively at the process that we have had, and I thank him for his constructive remarks on that. He balanced criticism of what the process was, with some ideas about how we might move forward. We have always said that this is the first go at having an Estimates Committee in the Territory and we certainly would like to look at the experiences that we have had over the last three days and how we make it more effective, and certainly more constructive, in the future.
But I cannot let what the Deputy Opposition Leader has said go by without making a few comments about some of the rewriting of what went on during those three days in Estimates Committee, compared with what really did go on. We set up a process that matched the hours that we had had in the Committee of the Whole in appropriations previously. As one who had been through it six times in that way, I matched, as we went through this process in estimates, with what we used to do in opposition. We always came in with a strategy and a focus of what the attention was we wanted to give to the budget, and where our priorities were. One of the things that we always believed and took as a fundamental when we came to the committee stage of appropriations debates, was that the budget books that we were dealing with, that government, year after year, brought down in the past, were the starting point.
We gave that work that was done by Treasury credibility. We said: ‘We are accepting that these are the numbers done to the best of ability’. That might mean you might find the odd typo, but we believed those budget books. We had arguments, discussions or questions in here based on the fact of what those allocations were; whether we agreed with the priorities, the dollars that were matching those priorities. On the whole, we had very constructive debates. Sometimes they got terse, and sometimes ministers and opposition members got very tired. But, there was a bottom line in what we discussed and that was that we trusted Treasury to produce the figures, according to direction by government of where money was spent, according to priorities, and according to outcomes.
What shocked me, as we went through those three days of estimates, and as I spent my 14 hours - or whatever it was - in front of the committee, was that we were not discussing priorities or outcomes for Territorians. What we were trying to defend - or what I was trying to defend, as Chief Minister and Treasurer, and what I was being attacked about - was whether this document had any credibility at all. It was as though we could not discuss anything about where funding was going or what we were trying to do as government for the Territory, because the opposition would give no credibility to this document. Yet, year after year, we, as opposition, did that. As my hours ticked by and I felt that the time was being wasted, it hit me very hard that we did not have an agreed fundamental to work on; that the opposition was simply saying Treasury had produced a lie, and …
Mr DUNHAM: A point of order, Mr Chairman! I do not think transcripts will bear out anybody saying that Treasury produced a lie.
Mr CHAIRMAN: There is not a point of order in this case.
Ms MARTIN: No, I have not accused anyone of lying. This is what disturbed me about the process we were part of: unless we as a parliament can agree that the figures produced in the budget books - and I know last year was an exception - are the figures that are done to the best of the ability of the Treasury, then we have no debate to have. We have no questioning to move forward with because there is simply no common ground to work from.
It was one of the things that we recognised following last year, and it is why we put in place FITA, the Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act, so that the figures in here, signed off by the Under Treasurer, were the figures we could work from. That is what the frustration from government was with this Estimates Committee process: we did not talk about the real things to do with allocations. We had an exercise that simply went round and round and round. For 14 hours - excluding the half an hour I had in my Arts responsibilities for which I want to say to all those who did the questioning: thank you, that was constructive. We actually talked about what Arts was going to do for the next 12 months, some of the strategies we had in place, some of the funding allocations against it.
For my time dealing with the Auditor-General, who has a budget of $2m and four staff, and does an important job but does scrupulously and accountably, and yet the Auditor-General got two-and-a-half hours of round and round and round. I do not know what was achieved. We followed that with the Ombudsman - again, round and round. We then moved into my Department of the Chief Minister – again time wasting. Time wasting hour after hour after hour. Nothing about what the priorities were. There are some really exciting priorities within the Department of the Chief Minister, but I got about three minutes to talk about the initiatives we are taking with the Office of Territory Development that match in a complementary way with the Social Policy Unit which in turn works with the Community Engagement Division. We have an Indigenous Policy Unit. These are exciting initiatives about where this government is going, and you should have been testing us about the funds allocated to that, and what we are going to achieve; but it was virtually untouched. The exciting ways this government is going about business: the different ways, the whole of government ways were virtually untouched. You should have really tested us about how we were going to achieve that. But none of that - none of that direction from government was tested in an appropriate way.
To listen to the Deputy Opposition Leader come in here and make constructive comments about estimates - I appreciate those, but they cannot be in isolation from what really happened in that Estimates Committee because, for hour after hour, I was embarrassed. I was embarrassed by the way the questions were asked, by the aggression with which the questions were asked. People walked out and described the atmosphere as venomous. That is not the way we run this parliament: a venomous atmosphere. I was also embarrassed by the way our senior public servants were treated. That is one of the fundamentals here. We have an Estimates Committee where you have the minister and, quite properly, as in every other place, those senior public servants. And yet, it is beholden on us as parliamentarians to treat those people who work for us, and with us, with respect. If you want to quiz somebody directly: it is the minister. If you want to offer criticism: it is the minister. Yet what I found was that our senior public servants were not being treated that way; they were being criticised. On behalf of this parliament and this government, I would like to apologise to those men and women, because that behaviour was very poor on the part of the opposition. They did not deserve that. That is not what an Estimates Committee is about.
There were certainly pluses from the Estimates Committee. Having been in here for six Committees of the Whole in appropriation, it was far better. The Deputy Opposition Leader made the point there was time wasted - time wasted by consulting with senior officials and somehow or other that came off the total time. Let me just say I stood over there year after year when ministers were asked questions and, after they had finished reading out the answers, when we asked a supplementary they would run across; they would disappear. How much time was wasted there? How much time was wasted, if we are going to talk about waste?
We said, year after year: ‘Have an Estimates Committee process, because then you will have in place that is appropriate: the minister answering those broad political directions and, quite properly, the agency officials with their expertise and their in-depth knowledge of the issues, offering a second part of the answer, quite appropriately’. I thought at one stage, while I was being verbally attacked by the Deputy Opposition Leader: why should we bother having Treasury staff at all? I said to them today: ‘The shadow Treasurer thinks I should be able to answer every single question, in depth, about activity in the Treasury’. And yet, I have a couple of hundred staff who know exactly what they are doing, who are experts in their field, and I value them for that. That is why I want them there in the Estimates Committee: to give that detailed answer that is quite appropriate to come from senior public servants.
We had, I believe, the elements of a good process. We, of course, will review that. The suggestion from the Deputy Opposition Leader that we actually get a committee to look at that is probably not a bad idea. We will talk about it further, but it does need to be looked at. We saw a better focus from the committee, once we did table all the answers. We actually got something done, rather than this tortured process of running around and around with questions asked that, in many cases, made no sense. I know that moving to accruals is difficult, and I will not stand here and say I do not find it difficult. Of course I find it difficult. If you look at the experience of other parliaments, of course, they found it difficult too. It is confusing for those who have worked in a cash framework, when you move to another. But to simply underpin every question with: ‘This must be a lie’, was absurd, particularly from a party that agreed to move to this accrual framework and put it in place, and who are accusing us of using so-called ruses which had been exactly the ones the previous government had given the year before, as we did that part move to outputs. It was very frustrating.
I hope we can actually review it in such a way that we make it a far more informative process next year. I hope that, having issues like the accrual process, we put mechanisms in place so when briefings are asked for, it does become easier giving the appropriate information that is asked for, before we hit the estimates time. I know, Mr Chairman, that you want ‘budgets for dummies’, but I do not think we can do it. Budgets are very complex. The accountability in budgets and some of the concepts are very complex. As much as it would be nice to have a very short document with a couple of lines of net appropriations, I do not think that is quite where we are heading in the 21st century.
I thank the Deputy Opposition Leader for his comments, but I say that it was not the most properly carried out process from the opposition. The way the questions were asked were, in many cases, simply offensive. The repetition of questions wasted the time of the committee, and I believe there was no real strategy about what the opposition was coming doing. Apart from trying to tear down the actual budget papers and say that, simply - following maybe the attitude that the opposition had in government last year - that you can actually write the bottom line, that they were perhaps transferring that onto our budget; which certainly is not the case.
I am proud of this budget. As Treasurer of a new government, I believe this budget book is really a major step forward in how we are accounting to Territorians. This budget book has more detail in it than we have seen in any budget books. I have had time over the last day, sitting upstairs watching proceedings, to go back and look at previous budget books. This one, as I pointed out numbers of times, lists the major variations in it …
Mr Dunham: Oh, no, it does not! Do you want us to take you back to those questions?
Ms MARTIN: We can hear the opposition laugh, but the laughter comes from a very scary base. It is one that says: ‘We produced a budget paper last year but you could not trust the figures’. You could not trust the figures last year, and they are trying to translate that kind of attitude to this budget, which comes under a very different legislative framework. We are proud of the Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act; of our move to accruals and Working for Outcome, and of this budget because, for a new government - and none of us here are pretending we know everything, we are learning and that learning curve will continue. We came into government with a very strong commitment: a commitment for better education for all Territorians, better health and greater community safety. We put that together with the strongest capital works budget we have ever seen. On those four points, we said that was what we would do; and that is what we have done.
I would like to make a final point on this. We sat there through the estimates, with the opposition trying to say we had been deceitful - we had been deceitful in saying that we had increased appropriations to those key areas. Yet, in my letterbox only the week before, I had the Opposition Leader’s newsletter. In it he said - addressing it to me personally which I thought was quite nice really - it had: ‘Hey, big spender’. There is a curious juxtaposition here: on one hand, saying: ‘You are not increasing allocations. So you are not increasing allocations, you are not increasing the appropriations’ - that was what we were accused of – ‘It is all a big lie, you are deceiving Territorians’. Yet he says: ‘Hey, big spender, you have all this extra money from the federal government’. Where did you think it went?
Mr Reed: And you are still taxing us $90 each for our car rego.
Ms MARTIN: We had the question from the Deputy Opposition Leader saying: ‘Where have you squirrelled all the extra money? Where is your hollow log?’. Our hollow log is demonstrated very clearly in this document: in health, education, community safety and capital works. It is all there, along with our deficit reduction strategies. Responsibly, what we have done with those increased relativities, is put them where they deserve to go, and where we committed that they would go: into education, health, community safety and capital works. We delivered in this budget what we said we would. From your point of view, opposition members, you have to get a consistent line. Either we are spending the money or not. You cannot run both lines. Either we got extra allocation from the federal government - which you said time and time again we did – and, yes, we did. We got those increased relativities. Where did you think they went? Did they disappear into some accrual accounting? No, they are real dollars in a real budget and we, on this side of the House, are very proud of it.
Mr DUNHAM: What a hard act to follow, Mr Chairman. When she does that pious hand on the heart thing, it is hard to keep ones gorge down. The last speaker talked about her frustration; her embarrassment;, she was sorry; and she found things offensive. Well, that is probably because this is the first opportunity we have had to have some reckoning about this budget. We have had opportunities, albeit small, in this parliament to talk about some of these things. But this is the opportunity for the people to look at the budget.
The Chief Minister went on at great length about all the promises they were going to implement: ‘That is what our new budget format is all about; it is called Working for Outcomes’, and that is what we wanted to see. The reason it took a fair while to get through the Auditor-General was because this was the first agency to come up and we could not reconcile. Okay, it is only a $1.5m or something, big deal! The budget could not be reconciled - one output group, tiny little budget, could not reconcile. That should have rung some alarm bells with the Chief Minister but she realised we wanted an audit trail, a paper trail, to demonstrate how significant government monies had found there way through the system.
The PAC spent a lot of time looking at $8m that was presentation for presentation purposes, albeit on the advice of the Under Treasurer, and in accord with accounting conventions and all the rest of it. We now have an accounting convention where there is $7.1m sitting in Health, which is totally out of line with anything that the Under Treasurer has done before. We know that there is about $10m there that is unaccounted for and there will be a paper trail to try to find that. We also know that this vain boast about $527m in Health is a furphy, because we know that there are significant amounts of dollars in there that are not available for services.
We know too, that there are some significant mistakes in this budget. I would say an $800m mistake ranks right up there. I do not think you would find mistakes much bigger than $800m in any budget. So, when we start to talk about: ‘Oh, you know, you had some difficulties with the document and you said it was all lies’ – no, we did not say it was all lies. However, we did pose the question to the Chief Minister: ‘Can you put your hand on this document and give a guarantee to the people of the Northern Territory that it is entirely correct?’, and she would not do it - she would not do it. It was probably pretty smart in the end, because, had she done it, we would have caught her out for fibbing - or at least being nave - because we found, I suppose, on our count now, up to 15 or so mistakes in that budget documentation. That is not a problem; it can be rectified. The Chief Minister and Treasurer has given an undertaking she will have an erratum sheet - which was your suggestion, Mr Chairman. That erratum sheet has probably now gone to about two pages. But it does show you the necessity for scrutiny. On a couple of occasions, departmental staff seemed to know about the error, and seemed to be waiting, hoping it would not be discovered. Well, it was, and I think that points to the necessity for this level of public scrutiny of a document.
The various stories about 30 hours, is a little like Working for Outputs. What you do is set a task, and then you give the resources - in this case, time resources - to achieve that task. It is a fairly simple thing for a government that has been breast-beating about the wonders that come out of accrual accounting and Working for Outcomes. It should be a simple task. You say: ‘We would like you to look at these substantial documents and a report to come back from you’. Now, you work out the calculations - what do you need for secretariat, chairs, seats and all those sorts of logistics - but you also work out time. There is no one – no one believes there was sufficient time for this exercise. Certainly the PAC did not believe that - and that includes three members of the government - and they quite readily signed off on a report saying that we needed two weeks. The solidarity argument that they talked about with the Leader of the Opposition wanting to put questions, and other members, as is their right, asking further questions; I would put the same question to government. Why don’t you talk to those three members of the PAC, who are quite knowledgeable about this process and say: ‘Do you reckon it is going to take two weeks?’ They would have said: ‘Yep, because that is what we told parliament’.
So, right from the outset, this thing was never going to fly. It is no good saying to us: ‘Well, you asked too many questions of the Chief Minister’. We had two hours of filibustering in this parliament before we even went in. We could have gone in at 9 am. We had this crazy spectacle of the Minister for Parks and Wildlife debating a document that he wanted to slip under the door, only a week or so before. The two hours that we spent in this parliament talking about various things that could have been done in some minutes, we could have quickly gone in. So, there is two hours we could have found. We could have found another couple of hours tonight, and we probably would have got there.
The fettering of this committee was done in an intentional way. It was done in a way that was calculated and intended to make sure that some ministers were able to hide behind the lack of time. I know in my portfolio areas, we are talking about $527m in the budget paper for Health. The Power and Water Authority is hundreds of millions. We had various other portfolio areas that add up to another, probably, about $1bn worth to look at. That is pretty significant cash. We should have had the opportunity to do that, and the government should probably be a little more brazen and courageous about this. We had the member for Sanderson saying: ‘We know what you want to do, you just want to dig up the dirt’. A few of them had the jitters a bit. It was a genuine straight up and down exercise. Most of the ministers would have realised that there was very little likelihood, unless they did something outrageously stupid, for them to find this a terminal exercise in terms of their ministerial careers.
However, the whole story about squandering time and the 30 hours, I think you can do it by computations, you can do it mathematically. And you can do it with some independent thought rather than just the thought of ‘Let us get in and out of here as quick as we can’.
I am very disappointed that, in Health and Community Services, I did not ask major questions on issues like HIV. It is a very topical issue at the moment; it is an issue that affects all of us. Drugs: the minister has chosen today to release a drugs policy. There a number of issues that come out of that, that are important for this parliament: issues relating to how a government does business, particularly promising for nurses, which we found to be a hollow promise. We found that there is a reduction of two, notwithstanding they are sending documents out presenting 20 as the increase. These are things the public need to know and they can only know if we have access to ministers, their documents, and their minders.
Otherwise, it is government by press release. That is what we have had for a year. We have had government by press release. The scrutiny that is given to a press release and to some of these media pronouncements are such that they are taken on face value and, as we found out in the last three days, they are often wrong. The public need to know that. They need to know these figures are wrong.
I applaud the work of the Chairman; he did a pretty good job. It was a difficult room, it was pretty tight. It was probably the wrong venue in some ways. There were a lot of other things attending on his time and mind other than what was happening on the floor. He had to contend with his usual recalcitrant side kick. When you look at all of that, I reckon he has done not too badly. I would like to think that he gave his best endeavours, and I think his best endeavours were not too bad. I am happy to say that on the Parliamentary Record.
In matters relating to the venue and things like that, there were obvious shortcomings, but some of those might have been hard to anticipate in the front and let us have another go. The timing could have been anticipated on day one, merely by reading the report of the PAC.
The business about hiding behind accrual accounting has to be put to bed. The line: ‘Well, you do not understand the new system of accrual accounting’ is a nonsense. It is a furphy. If it is paraded out every time there is a figure that is different, we have some significant problems with this entire budget because, every time there is a figure different; whether it is up, down - one of the figures that I used in a question was under the Uniform Presentation Format. It has nothing to do with accrual accounting. In that figure, Health drops $5m. The year before, the year after: the same input, the same factors. So you have to ask: why would the Australian Bureau of Statistics - or whatever device is used to input those figures - have a reduction in a department that has gone up $80m in the last year, from $447m in the May budget of last year to $527m in this budget - $80m? How could the ABS get it so wrong that it says it is down by $5m? I welcome people - inquirers into this debate and other researchers - to have a look at that because I still do not know why. I am sure the people of the department do not know why. Treasury does not know why. This is a comparative; this is not the furphy about accrual accounting. This is Uniform Presentation Format (UPF), one of these wonderful things that has come out of this Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act.
The Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act also says that you have to bring your budget in on time because the CEO is responsible. The Chief Minister told us that it was tantamount to an execution squad for CEOs who did not bring their budget in on target. Well, we found a few of them where the budget was way out of whack with the money they were given. So you have to ask the question: is this just the usual pre-election rhetoric dressed up in a different format, that, at the end of the day, really does not mean anything? It really does not mean anything, because what you do with your money is no big deal. Mistakes in the order of $800m have never been known in this parliament – never been known! I will guarantee you, your erratum list – that was a very smart idea - will run to two pages, I am quite sure of it. I am also sure that, in the interests of openness, transparency and honesty, those public servants who know there are errors in there can use it as a time to cleanse their conscience and divulge these errors in the budget. They are not going to get caught up and hauled before the Estimates Committee because it has done its job. But it does mean that, when you open the book and flick through it, you can have some reliability about the figures there.
I would like to thank the staff, especially Terry and Ros, but also the other staff of the parliament who came in. When this House has a stress in one area, they pretty much all help each other out; it is like a big family. While those two are obviously most deserving of the thanks of the committee, the House, once again, showed that it was able to cope with some new anomalous thing that just dropped in its lap, and it did it well.
While I am on that, it should be put on the record that the resources for the Speaker’s Office definitely are an issue of concern. The increasing cost of power in this place, and other increasing costs that are not deferrable, will mean that some of the good work of the committees, which are deferrable and which can be curtailed, could well be put in jeopardy by the budget that has been presented. I ask the government to take that on.
The business of the Leader of Government Business saying: ‘Well here are the answers, here you go’. That could have been done on day one. On day one he could have done it; it is the Tasmanian model. It is the one that he sent us off to have a look at: the day before you go in, you have all the answers. I understand your point of view, Mr Chairman, that you are not that fussed on it because it does mean that some of these things do not get into the permanent public record, because they are matters for politicians and do not find their way into the generic Hansard record. Nonetheless, there could be a hybrid. Maybe you will produce a report with all the questions and answers, and maybe you will produce a Hansard with supplementaries. There are ways through this; it is not that hard.
The Chief Minister was mightily offended that people were hostile to her or something - I cannot remember the word she used. However, she has to learn to mind her tongue because, when she was in there, she made a couple of comments that were provocative. I just put them down to the normal filibustering: when in trouble, resort to personal abuse, pick a little fight, then you can have a side show going while you get yourself out of trouble. A few ministers resorted to that. Certainly the minister for Industries and Development - or whatever he is - tried it, as did the Minister for Community Development and a few of the others. They wandered back into the past and did this little: ‘Nah nah, let me tell you about black holes and how things used to be’. I can understand that swagger. It must be good to have come out of being in opposition here after so many years, and being the ones sitting there saying: ‘Well, I do not care what you think’. However, that swagger is a thing called arrogance, and we saw it. We saw it manifest itself in such a way that it was evident to a lot of people. While the Chief Minister went out and said: ‘Oh look, there is a vindictive feel in there’, there were a lot of commentators who came out and said: ‘Look, I cannot believe the incompetence of the ministers who do not seem to understand fundamentals, and if something is not written down for them they cannot seem to think about the issue, and the swagger factor’. The swagger factor, it was right there. That is okay because, politically, it is to our benefit that the more arrogant you get, obviously, the more people might look at us as an attractive alternative at the next election.
I believe the future for the Estimates Committee is probably good; it is on a reasonable launch path. Those ministers who have fronted it now realise that it is not the boogie man they thought; that it was going to find all the dirt, as the member for Sanderson said. I am sure they will find that their careers will not be terminated by a visit to the Estimates Committee. So, let us get down to make the thing work. I am not saying that the PAC is not a competent place to look at it, but I support the idea that maybe it needs different eyes. I also support the idea that maybe the eyes that look at it include Madam Speaker and yourself, Mr Chairman, and it should be done on the basis of the machinery and the mechanics of the thing, and leave all the political rhetoric and all the rest of it away for another day. Let us look at how we can make this thing work, and work well.
Regarding some of the backslapping the government has done about what a wonderful beast it is; if you drew up a ledger there are certainly some things in its favour and some things against it. However, line ball, it is not as good as we used to have. That was one of the first hurdles we used to have to jump across because, as I said when we embarked on this path, the hurdle is that it has to be at least as good as what went before. What went before was the capacity for every member to ask a question until those questions were exhausted. It is no good saying that took 20 hours or whatever, because the prerogative of asking questions and supplementaries belonged to the opposition, and you chose to take 20 hours. So, I would say the first hurdle of exhausting those questions was not cleared.
The second hurdle was being at least comparable with some of the promises made by the Labor Party. It did not make that run either; it is nowhere near that hurdle. We know, for starters, that that was a promise of legislation, and this whole beast was only forced, I daresay, because I introduced a Private Members Bill which still sits on the paper. That subtle prod was a bit of a wake-up call for the government, who said: ‘Oh, budget is coming on and we made all those promises to the punters. We had better set this thing up and call it the Estimates Committee’. What they did was they re-branded what was Committee of a Whole in here and made it go to a different room. We could have all worn silly hats, for all I know, just to make it look like it was differentiated from what went before.
What went before was a hell of a lot like this; it was pretty similar. If you look at the advantages of what went before, some of it was much better. This is a better place; it is easier for the public, it is easier for the media, so there are three ticks. The fact that we exhausted all the questions: this could have been something that could have built on what went before, and it did not. I will be generous enough to say that if you look at the ledger, maybe it is line ball. But I would say those two failings: of not being better than what went before, and not at least living up to the promises of government, leave you with a bit of a smell about this; and it is a smell you can fix up. You should do it by designing adequately and far enough out, how we are going to do it next year. That should be done on the basis: first step, adequacy of time. Because it was obvious to blind Freddy that that was not going to be achieved on this occasion.
Mr KIELY: Mr Chairman, much is being made in this debate about time and the venue of the Estimates Committee. I would also like to throw into the mix a piece on the quantity and quality of the questions and answers, but I will go back to the time issue. The Estimates Committee did meet for something like 32 hours. Historically, that has proven to be a fairly reasonable time. The time that was set down was known quite well to the opposition, as well as to the ministers. The block of time was known well ahead, so we went into the process on the understanding that time management would be adhered to; that shadow ministers would be able to construct their questions around that. As a matter of fact, there was the opportunity to submit questions prior to going into the committee, of which the opposition amassed something like 1100. So, full points to them.
Yet, when we got in there, we found that the concept of time management seemed to have gone out the window. We had the first member before the committee, the Speaker, I think she was on for something like 1 or 2 hours. Then we had the Chief Minister who was on for something in the vicinity of 15 hours; and the Deputy Chief Minister was on for 9 hours. Then we saw quite a change come about, and I will get to what happened with that change and why we saw a far more rapid turnaround of the ministers before the committee after that.
But when you get to the time, you really have to wonder why, when it was known well in advance that we had 30 hours, the opposition did not have a look and construct their approaches as to how they were going to interrogate the Appropriations Bill in a far more disciplined manner? I was pretty amazed at the amount of time it took to interrogate the portfolio responsibilities of the Chief Minister. I was also amazed about the quality of the questions and the way they were put. We had all these written questions there, and they were going through one at a time. They would ask that written question and then the response would be stated to them, and then out came the supplementaries.
I could understand the shadow minister asking the supplementary. I could understand them asking the question without notice, but I really started to wonder why the other MLAs were getting in on the act. When you look at time management, if there had been a bit of discipline from the other side, then the other MLAs would have either handed all those questions - which did not relate to their own electorates might I say - over to the shadow minister and had the shadow minister ask them, and get some roll-on; some way that you could actually get down and interrogate. Instead, what we saw going through, particularly with the Chief Minister, was what I consider to be point scoring.
There was no real effort to interrogate the outputs. There was, what I consider, a superficial look at the actual appropriation, but was that was more in the way of trying to score points and show whose figures were what, and ‘our figures were best in the last budget’. During that interrogation, the matter of accrual accounting and the changes that are going on became pretty clear also. The changes to accrual accounting have been going on for quite some years; quite some years. The Deputy Leader of the Opposition, who was the Treasurer in the previous government, stated that he understands it. But it became pretty clear - I am not having a swipe at the other side, because it is probably amongst our own members as well - that there is a lack of understanding of what accrual accounting means. I have a very fundamental idea of accrual accounting from my previous employment, but I appreciate that I need more training on it. I would really like to say that when the member for Drysdale was talking about maybe getting it better next year, one of the things we should be looking at is for all members to go off and get some training on accrual accounting, because this is the only way that we are really going to interrogate the Appropriation Bill properly.
It is not a matter of trying to point score, trying to see if you can dumb up the minister, because you will not. I tell you why you will not, because sitting behind them is a highly skilled public service. It is the highly skilled public service who can come up with those answers. But if the people who are interrogating the Appropriation Bill, who are questioning the minister on different items, do not understand it, then they are all over the place, and it really detracts from the quality of the review of the budget.
When we talked about time, you could not help but notice how, when the opposition did not have those questions and answers in front of them, they took a long time; they were asking a lot of supplementaries. However, with the foresight of the Deputy Chief Minister, who thought: ‘Well look, we have to do something to help the opposition along to try to assist them get through and get as much access to as many ministers, to as many line items as possible’, when he said: ‘Okay, what we will do is provide you with the answers’ - that was about 7.30 pm last night – well, we saw a really huge change, didn’t we? The Deputy Chief Minister was in the chair then and he went through right into the morning. The Chief Minister was in there for 15 hours, the Deputy was in there for about nine. Then he saw the Justice Minister - a very complex portfolio - who was in there for about three hours. The Minister for Business, Industries and Resource Development was in there for approximately two hours. The Minister for Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs was in there for – I think for only one hour. Then the Minister for Health and Community Services was there for about two hours.
Let me say when you have a look at the time the Minister for Health and Community Services was there, that is where we saw one of the best uses of the Estimates Committee as it was structured, because the member for Drysdale came in with a very, very complex question about the budget going right back over the years and she had the information there from those people who were assisting her, and she could roll that straight out to him. The member for Drysdale also asked her a very complex question about severance of the previous CEO. Bang! Got that answer straight up and was able to move on. That is how the Estimates Committee should work; that is how the process should work. I commend the Minister for Health and Community Service for her foresight, her employees who stood in for her, and the Executive Officer of the Office of the Commissioner of Public Employment.
When we get on to the quantity and quality of the questions, the fact of the matter is that, in this process, we still answered 1100 questions. That is the 1100 written questions, not to mention I do not know how many supplementary questions were answered - but we did answer them; they are sitting on the record. That speaks volumes of itself. That was in 32 hours. So, this government probably answered in the vicinity of 1500 questions, I would suggest - maybe more. We will get the count later. That is the real result here.
When we look a the quality of the questions, however, there was so much point scoring going on from the opposition - they were so much trying to play the man and not the ball - that I did not hear too many questions on indigenous education, or the state of the public sector. I heard very few questions on actual health outcomes, and that goes through all the other portfolios, too. So, on the actual work of government and the services that we are providing in the community, I did not here anything. All I heard was shadow ministers trying to climb in to the ministers and score cheap political points. There are two reasons why this thing fell over, as far as the time lines go: one is that the shadow ministry does not reflect what the actual Cabinet looks like, so they were confused about where to come in and out and how to ask questions. They did not get together - that was pretty clear - and have a look at a strategy on how to best interrogate and find out what outputs they really wanted to address. Second, there was a lack of discipline. When their leader tried to call them to heel, they did not; they all still wanted to grab a bit of the glory.
There is so much more to talk about in the Estimates Committee, so much more I would love to address. However, I have run out of time. I would like to finish by saying that the responses from the Deputy Opposition Leader about thanks to everyone else, I echo those. A special thanks to the Chairman; he did a marvellous job under very stressful conditions. I think it was excellent, and I commend him for his fortitude, tolerance and forbearance, and that also goes to all the ministers who appeared.
Mr CHAIRMAN: Maybe we could ask for more time for backbenchers to speak to Appropriation Bills.
Mr ELFERINK: Mr Chairman, naturally, one of the first comments I make is that, in one of my major portfolio areas of Parks and Wildlife, I was unable, because of the process that we chose to go down as a parliament, to ask some questions in relation to Parks and Wildlife. That is a shame because I was really looking forward to quizzing the minister in relation to what he was going to do with the money that he was asking us to interrogate.
Indeed, I was fortunate enough on a couple of occasions to speak to ministers such as the Chief Minister herself, in her capacity as the Minister for Arts and Museums, to interrogate what she was planning to do with the money. I was gratified, although it was very difficult to be critical about such a positive budget for Arts and Museums, to be able to engage in a two-way conversation, which was largely constructive, about where the money was going. It disappoints me, of course, that in Parks and Wildlife, through DIPE, I was unable to ask questions; specifically one which has become very close to my heart.
This is a problem with the process. I do not think that either side will walk away from this Chamber and honestly say that the process was flawless. I do not believe it was flawless. One of my greatest disappointments about it, of course, is that we ran out of time. When we established the Estimates Committee process, it was already in the mind of the Deputy Chief Minister that this was a possibility, because, in his summation to the debate dealing with the establishment of the Estimates Committee, he predicted that this may be a possible outcome of the Estimates Committee process.
There were times when this particular side of the House was used grill, inside this Chamber in the old committee process, the appropriation process. It has already been pointed out that, in those times, it was quite possible for such a process to go for many hours – 47 hours, I think, was the longest period I had ever heard of. I believe, Mr Chairman, that you yourself believe that there is room for some expansion of time for ministers. Perhaps 14 hours for the Chief Minister was too long. I believe the system in Tasmania is that they use nine hours a minister, and that should be enough time to interrogate a budget. I hope that, in the future, when we come to reviewing what has happened in the last couple of days, that we do visit the issue of time, because we have to understand the context in which this particular process was taking place.
Under the old system, where members of the opposition came in here, the budget papers were pretty much understood and accepted, as the Chief Minister pointed out. Through that process, a whole series of questions were fired off, and those people who fired those questions off were able to follow up with supplementaries. The Hansard is full of the then Deputy Leader of the Opposition asking supplementary questions of ministers on repeated occasions. Certainly, the former member for Macdonnell, Mr Neil Bell and the former for Wanguri, Mr Bailey, used to – I will not say ‘torture’, it is probably the wrong word - interrogate the budget process and interrogate it hard. That process was not necessarily a bad one.
Perhaps working into the wee small hours of the morning was something that could have been looked at, and an extra sitting day may have been appropriate in that period. I pick up on what the member for Drysdale had to say in relation to which system was better. I quite like the idea of being able to sit down and interrogate the budget directly over the table where there are public servants sitting next to the ministers, because the expert advice of those departments is useful for getting information out of those departments expeditiously.
The only problem is that the room was too cluttered, in many ways, during the estimates debate. I have to say, I would like a whole lot more table space next time round just for the reams of paperwork. I made the observation to several people while I was there that it looked like the bureaucratic equivalent of trench warfare at one stage, with the carnage along our table being reminiscent of it. When the further answers were delivered, I suddenly realised that trench warfare had taken a new step forward, with the big artillery, and we were then fighting the battles of Passchendaele on the Somme. However, I think that it is worth noting that those sorts of practical issues are very real. I watched it, as a very, very busy room. If you like busy places, that was certainly the place to be. Certainly, the matter of the structure of the room deserves visiting again.
I do not agree with the comments by the Chief Minister that Budget Paper No 3, in this instance, should not have been interrogated. I believe that it should have been interrogated. It is a legitimate thing to interrogate something like a budget paper and any other associated document that comes to a committee. It is worth interrogating it for the purposes of establishing the security for the foundations upon which you are working. The interrogation process, especially now that we are working with a new budgetary system, was always going to take longer. The Chief Minister herself had said, on several occasions that, effectively, the Treasury have put together four budgets in the space of 12 months. That may be true, and for that reason alone, we should have allowed more time because it was a new system, and that new system was going to create some confusion. The Chief Minister herself has admitted and accepted that that has been the case. That confusion was going to be a time-consuming exercise. It was also a new system in which, when we inquired or asked questions of Madam Speaker in the Legislative Assembly, we were all surprised how far over time that ran, because the new system was something we were trying to feel our way into. So, things like a new accrual accounting system-based set of budget papers are going to require interrogation, and it is reasonable that members of the opposition try and inquire of members of government, and that those members of government are actually capable of understanding the documentations in front of them, at least to the degree where they can answer questions. I believe that was the thrust of much of the line of questioning from the members of the opposition.
Returning to what I was saying before, I hope that upstairs one of the minister’s Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment people is listening, because my much-loved question - question No 896, which I harrowed the poor Chairman over on repeated occasions - did not get to see the light of day. I can only say that I am crestfallen over the fact that this question did not get up. There are several bullet points in relation to the answer I was given on paper. It was one I was thoroughly looking forward to asking some questions on, because the bullet points do not go anywhere near what I require. I have to say that it is an awful shame. So, I ask the minister to return his attention to the 65 vacant positions in his department that I have identified in this question, and position to position, at this time - today if you like - tell me what is happening with those positions. I would like to hear from the minister: what has happened to the ‘Horticulturalist T1R, position No 14875’? What has happened to that vacancy? Has the position been cut? Has it disappeared off the face of the planet? Is there somebody now working in that job?
I ask the minister what has happened to ‘Hydro Assistant, Technical 2, position No 13115’? What has happened to that job? What has happened to the person who used to fill that job? Is the department going to fill any of these 65 positions? It is a very important issue for the people of the Northern Territory, and I am deeply concerned that these jobs have been lost to the people of the Northern Territory. I feel the minister’s obfuscation - especially when the question itself disappeared out of my paperwork when it was delivered. Its omission was immediately concerning to me because it is a question I have been hounding, pursuing, the minister on for quite some time. There are 65 positions here about which still remains unanswered. I would very much hope that the minister will take the time to be kind enough to even offer me a briefing, perhaps, on these 65 positions, so that I might find out what has happened to the ‘Planning Officer, Professional 2, position No 4460’.
It would have also been good to make further inquiries in relation to some of the answers I have been given in writing. I have to say that I picked up the comments by the member for Sanderson, that once the answers had been handed over, the process did, indeed, seem to go more smoothly. My only complaint or criticism, is that if that was such a great way to expedite the process, it should have happened on the Monday. Or, better still, perhaps on the Friday before the weekend so we would have had time to peruse it, and then create a series of supplementary questions which were incisive, which did demonstrate themselves to be worthy of the process the government has put into place.
The old system was attractive to me because the process allowed itself one advantage that this process does not, and that was the ability for their minister to stand up and say: ‘All done, any more questions from the floor?’ There be a long pause: ‘Any more questions from the floor? Does anybody have anymore questions?’, going, going, gone. Unfortunately, the time limit which has been applied in this process has removed that ability. I would like to see a system of supplementary questions be created where it can be incisive and the effects of those supplementary questions can reduce the time spent. But it is important that all inquiries need to be exhausted and I would like the system again returned. However, I would like to see it look less thrown together than it was on this occasion - and that is no reflection on the staff of the Legislative Assembly who had to work off a mud map at the best, very quickly, to throw together a system. Now that we are going to stick to the system - it has been decided that we are going to stick to it – I would like to have that one important factor built into it: that everything that is done around that committee should have attached to it the assumption that the minister, at the end of the day, will be able to say: ‘Are there any more questions?’, because the integrity of the appropriation process hangs on that one issue. If the minister cannot stand up and say: ‘I was able to stand up and ask the whole committee if there were any more questions’, then the minister cannot truly say that the parliament had entirely agreed to the appropriation that the minister was seeking.
However, we live and learn, Mr Chairman, and I hope to see an improved system next time round.
Mr McADAM: Mr Chairman, I speak briefly tonight in respect of the public hearings of the Estimates Committee and also the tabling of the report. I must say that, as a new member of parliament, I guess I was rather amused and sometimes perplexed in respect to the whole exercise. In certain circumstances, other members were as well, given the new process.
The thing that concerned me most was the fact that members opposite were always aware of the process in respect to this Estimates Committee. I can recall when the Leader of Government Business in the House, the Deputy Chief Minister, made it very clear in the August sittings as to what that process would be. Members opposite have had that opportunity to develop strategies, to work out precisely how they were going to approach it or, indeed, coordinate their approach. It is for that reason that I was a little disappointed in respect to how we operated as a committee. But, at the same time, I believe that there are some speakers tonight who have, in a very positive way, already given some suggestions in respect to what some of the changes might be. You will also be aware that the Deputy Chief Minister, the Leader of Government Business in the House, gave an assurance, as I understood it at the time, that he would undertake a review process. Some of the suggestions will go part of the way in respect to making it a far better exercise in the future.
The other thing that I want to say is that, because there were some very venomous exchanges on occasions - and it does not speak well of us as politicians in the Territory, because I believe that the Territory is maturing as a state, if I could call it that, and we have been doing that very slowly over the last few years. It is incumbent upon us, as members of this parliament and representatives of people in the Territory, that we perhaps take a step back and consider just how we behave in such circumstances. I have no intentions tonight to lay blame in respect of any particular member, but I share the Chief Minister’s view in respect of the sometimes contemptuous manner in which we treated some public servants. Already, people in this House tonight have acknowledged that they worked very, very hard in respect of fulfilling their obligations to this exercise and, indeed, to us. I felt, on occasions, a little ashamed that we did not treat them with the respect that they deserve. To me, that is of immense concern particularly, as I said previously, because they are also members of this Territory community and they thoroughly deserve respect.
The other issue that I want to raise tonight which we have to give some consideration to, is the fact that perhaps the venue was not the best place. It is all okay to talk in retrospect in regard to those sorts of things, but there are real opportunities in making this exercise a far better one in the future.
Many of the things I was going to say have actually been covered by other speakers but, in conclusion, just let me say that I think it was a learning exercise for all of us over the last three days. It is incumbent upon us to ensure that we put in place a process that is going to provide the best possible information to the people of the Northern Territory. I am absolutely convinced given, in certain circumstances, the support portrayed by the other side in regards to the future of this.
Finally, just let me say to Terry Hanley and to Ros Vogeli: I know you put in a lot of hard hours. I, too, would like to extend my appreciation to them for their hard work that they have put in and, indeed, to all parliamentary staff and the members of Hansard who worked very, very hard. The Chairperson of the Committee, the member for Johnston, Chris Burns, did a very, very professional job. It was, indeed, a very difficult job, and I think Chris’ conduct of the whole hearing, in many cases held the committee together. So to you, member for Johnston, I extend my very sincere appreciation.
A final word, and I say this quite seriously to members on the other side: be part of a process, be constructive, treat our fellow Territorians and, particularly, our public servants with the respect they deserve. I am absolutely certain that subject to this review, next year or the year after, we will have a process in place that will basically provide the people of the Territory with information and the scrutiny that they so justly deserve.
Mr MILLS: Mr Chairman, following on from a theme raised by the member for Barkly that the Territory is maturing, I say that this process that we have all been involved in is one that has matured us, as well. The idea of inputs and outputs and what on earth they really do mean, and the phrases that are used in the budgetary process - if we are honest about it - are genuinely challenging. For us, as elected representatives, to get a real grasp of that and to play our role genuinely, we do really need to understand the budget. From the opposition’s side, the amount of work that actually does go into formulating questions is instructive in itself, because you need to have a sense of what you need to know. What you do not know has to be defined by the body of knowledge that you already have a sense of. So, that was instructive for myself and for members on this side, to be involved in that process. I am sure that, for the ministers who were the recipients of questions that were being formulated on the opposition side, it was also quite instructive to be prepared for the process of estimates.
We mature as elected representatives. I believe, as a shadow minister, I have learnt a lot through this process and, as a member of the opposition and a member of this Chamber. What I have learnt as a member of this Chamber is that there are other ways of doing things. Initially, perhaps instinctively, unsure about going into new places, I had a sense that the appropriation system that we had in place was more than adequate. I have learnt, through this process, that there are elements of the estimates process that are beneficial. I do not think you have heard a disendorsement of the central notion of the estimates process as being anything less than positive for producing a better outcome for Territorians.
It is quite clear that time was the issue. I have to say – and it may not be understood on the other side - that, in a sense, the excitement of the newness of this whole thing, the first day, had us actively and deeply engaged in the process. It was a bit like, I suppose, getting so engrossed in this process that the essence of what this was really about was all-encompassing, and I found it genuinely engrossing. However, that is where I find some difficulties with the criticisms that have been raised by members of government, with respect to how opposition behaved. They constantly went to the simplistic position of saying: ‘Well, once when you had appropriation you had this amount of time, and now we have estimates, so it should be about the same amount of time. That is fair, isn’t it?’ We often heard the apples with apples debate. We are not comparing apples with apples. This is a completely different process and, as the minister for Education noticed, it was actually quite a constructive engagement, going back and forth, seeking clarification of particular issues. We all benefited from that. The only way to make full use of this, is one that is going to take a lot of time. It is not just the time of asking the question, but of consulting and formulating an appropriate answer which, once again, has to be responded to and so on. So, the whole process is one that does require a certain amount of time.
There is a contrast between two aspects here. There is a full endorsement, I would have to say for myself personally, and my colleagues, as we get together and form a formal response to this but, generally, we do support the concept. Of course, there are aspects of the process - namely time - that we would like primarily addressed, and that will be the topic of discussion at later times. I have to say that our actions, in opposition, would have demonstrated that we supported the central notion of the Estimates Committee. However, in doing so, we also were able to demonstrate that there were fundamental flaws in the process.
Many of the points that I wish to raise have already been raised, so I probably do not need to add anything else, other than, the maturity that would come as a result of being engaged in a process such as this. Something that I found most beneficial is that the parliament here sometimes - well most often, I think, we would walk away from finding that it is quite unsatisfactory in terms of actually doing anything constructive. It is often draw a line down the middle and just shout at each other, and then put it to the vote and guess who wins. It is not really progressing the issue. Whereas, for the first time - as maybe a ‘newish’ member being involved in the estimates process - I found the engagement across the table was really stimulating, because you are actively involved in the questioning. The questions were not like questions in Question Times, because it was able to go backwards and forwards. There was a whole line of questions, and the questions come as a result of understanding what the community needs and how the mechanics of the budget are able to genuinely deliver this outcome. So, that whole backwards and forwards thing was really a very good experience. That was something very special for me and a number of members on our side would concur with that point of view.
Without going any further with lots of the points that have already been raised: attacking aspects or supporting this side and whatever – I am not too interested and we are too tired for all that. Thanks and appreciation has to go to the PAC because, whereas some of us could come and go, they remained; particularly the Chairman. Compliments to the member for Johnston. It was a very difficult task and you did it admirably. For Terry Hanley and Ros Vogeli and the Legislative Assembly staff, there is genuine appreciation for the amount of work that you individually did and the support that you have given. Also to the Hansard staff who have done an outstanding job.
I take the member for Barkly’s comments that departmental officers may have perceived our questioning to have been a little strong at times. I can assure you that the intent was one which carried the best interests of Territorians at heart. If any offence was committed against any departmental officer, I hope they realise that it was not intended; our intention was to ascertain to our satisfaction the issues that were being discussed at that point. So, thanks to every departmental officer who was involved in the many functions that I have attended in the last few days. The day after we submitted our questions, particularly, I kept running into public servants who gave me the impression that they were working on the questions. I was very mindful of constructing questions, knowing that what I was writing would be work for a member of some department or agency out there. I was also mindful of knowing that the work we do is important work, but we do not want to add unnecessary burdens on those who are here to support us in our task of representing Territorians.
For the ministerial staff supporting the ministers, and for the ministers themselves, credit to you all; and for members on this side and in government. With those few comments, I look forward to how this whole issue will unfold. I will certainly be playing an active part with my colleagues on both sides of the House, and my good mate here, the Independent, on making sure whatever we come up with will be of immense benefit to Territorians.
Mr STIRLING: Mr Chairman, I am greatly encouraged by the positive comments coming forward in this debate tonight, particularly when you get such positive comments from the members for Katherine and Drysdale, who often find it difficult to get positive about too much that the government does. It encourages me even further because - whilst there are difficulties with the process, and that is recognised - there is solid commitment and support to look closely at the Estimates Committee, to ensuring that an Estimates Committee process goes forward and we do not go back to Committee as a Whole.
A couple of the points made in relation to the review: government was committed, at the outset, to a review of the process, because we did not make any claims that we were going to have the process perfect first time up. We said this would be a trial. We did not take the step of legislating any of the steps at this stage, because we wanted to see how it would work, and that review process will go forward. The original idea was that the Public Accounts Committee itself would undertake the task of reviewing the Estimates Committee process and debate putting forward recommendations and changes for the future. The member for Katherine had a slightly different view as to what might form a committee, and I was here when the Chief Minister said that she would take those comments on board. So we have a situation of a commitment to a review, but perhaps not quite sure what body or who will quite undertake that review. Nonetheless, that will occur, and we will ensure that members have an opportunity to put their views forward.
Much has been said about time. Thirty-two-and-three-quarter hours was allowed at the gong tonight at 6.40 pm, against 30 hours and 28 minutes last year, 28 hours and 40 minutes the year before, 28 hours 51 minutes the year before that, 27 hours and 7 minutes the year before that which was 1998, and we go back to those two marathons of 1997 and 1996, both remarkably coming in at 41 hours and 11 minutes each, despite being a year apart. At the same time, being the same dates, the 17 to 19 June 1996, and 17 to 19 June 1997. So, a remarkable coincidence on those counts.
I am not convinced that the quantity of time itself was so much the problem, but more how it was used, particularly in the first two days of debate. When you are going to spend 14 hours with a minister out of all-up 32 hours, the committee and opposition members should have been aware that they were closing down the amount of time they would have left for each minister. I was before the committee for nine hours. I do not mind that; Education is a $500m budget, 3600-odd staff; on top of that, Police, Fire and Emergency Services with its $100m plus, almost 1000 staff; Racing, Gaming and Licensing, a revenue earner for us. I welcome the fact that I had that opportunity before the committee to address more fully the answers that were provided in the supplementaries that were given. Unfortunately, other ministers were not given that opportunity, not just for opposition but for this parliament, for government and for the people of the Territory.
It is very wrong that the seventh minister did not get before the committee at all, and we have to work together, I suggest, to ensure that that does not occur again. In fact, I think it was the member for Katherine, and may have been the member for Drysdale as well, who said that it was not too much longer that was needed. On balance, at the end of the debate, the member for Katherine probably said a couple of hours. If we had not used that couple of hours first-up on the Tuesday morning, it may well have been enough to get us there. I am sure 32 hours was enough to get us there, to every minister before the committee, if more diligent use of the time had been applied over the first two days or so of the committee.
The answers going across on the Wednesday night was obviously a facilitator of the process. It was acknowledged by some speakers, including the members for Blain and Drysdale. I could not believe the outrage that that caused at the committee, when I tried to explain to the committee that I had written to the Chairman putting forward a proposal that government was going to drop all of the answers down to the committee rooms 24 hours in advance of the close of the process, so that those ministers yet to come before the committee, and those interested in those responses had a chance to get across them and perhaps get more strategic about those areas that they wanted to go into further detail, having gone across the hours. I understand afterwards and during that debate, that the malevolence that was directed at me at that time was a result of misunderstanding of exactly what I was trying to do, because a view had been formed that I was trying to close down the process. I was, of course, trying to help it by having the answers delivered down there. Nonetheless, that set a pretty poor tone for a while there.
Mr Mills: The tone of the letter did not help at all.
Mr STIRLING: Well, you made that point very clearly, that it was a question of the tone, and I accept responsibility for that. Nonetheless, I was as frustrated as no doubt you were, at sitting cooling my heels for 14 hours of committee time, during which time I would have thought - we only ever had the Treasurer, Chief Minister, and those occasions when the Treasurer was the Chief Minister, on their feet for a couple of hours at any time. 14 hours was extraordinary. I still maintain that 32 hours was ample. It is not the quantity; it is much more a question of how it was used.
I was interested in the question of the location. I agree with those who commented on it - the members for Barkly, Katherine and Drysdale - not ideal in terms of space and the number of people who did want to come in and observe the process. We welcome that, and as a parliament we should, and we should encourage more of it. Perhaps the Chan Building is an alternative venue. It is pretty handy to us here, it is just a walk across the road. It is a large venue. I had difficulties with the set-up of the room. I had a picture that you would have the committee seated together, and those members who wanted to ask questions seated, perhaps, a little apart from the committee so it was a very clear structure as to what we were facing. When I walked in there to see the process shortly after commencement, with the Chief Minister as the minister before the committee - in fact, the Speaker before that - it was difficult for me to understand who was who. The Chairman was separated from the committee by virtue of being at one end, up with the assistants, and the committee down another side. That has to be placed in a much more positive fashion so that the committee is clearly recognised in a prominent place in the room.
I foresaw this difficulty, and I take responsibility for not driving a harder bargain with many of the negotiating sessions I had with the member for Katherine in the lead-up to the final 5 hour debate we had in here in putting this process in place. This was the idea of how many people might be present to ask questions at any one time. I was of a view, initially, that you would have the committee, and that those other members wanting to ask questions should play a bit of a tag team or an interchange bench, so that the member of the committee would substitute for another member coming on. I thought that would have been a tighter and more orderly process in the sense of, perhaps, only keeping five or six people as part of committee at any one time. I was dissuaded from that course by the member for Katherine who argued – cogently, I must say - that we had to bear in mind not to weaken the process from the Committee of the Whole in the parliament.
Of course, the Committee of the Whole has the facility for any member at any time to ask a question or a supplementary question in relation to their electorate, or on a particular question that is before the committee at any time. I was taken with the strength of the argument in the sense that I wanted the committee process to work, to be an enhancement on the Committee of the Whole. So, we worked through this and decided yes, it was fair that any member could jump on any question at any time, although there was priority first to committee members, the shadow minister, and then other members. That was not always strictly applied throughout the committee process, but it did seem to me to be over-cumbersome; that there were too many people there. Certainly, when I went down, as I said, when the Chief Minister was there, there were eight people asking questions, all over the place. Now, we have to be more strategic and have a more orderly process. I do not have the answers, but I am sure the process of consultation and review may provide some of those answers to some of the difficulties that I saw.
I stress, however, that in the end the process, as always was going to be the case, there were written answers to all the questions that were provided in advance. I still think it was very wrong that the Minister for Infrastructure, Planning and Environment did not get before the committee, and we do have to ensure that that never occurs again.
I commend the committee for the work that they did; not an easy task. I particularly single out, as I think every other speaker in the debate has, the efforts of the Chairman of the Estimates Committee, the member for Johnston. I thought he chaired objectively. Certainly, on one occasion, his voice was raised, and there was good cause for it to be raised at that time. But generally, his sense of humour, his even-handedness, kept a handle on the process pretty much throughout, with at least one exception that I personally witnessed, which I thought was unfortunate. However, even in that situation, I thought he handled it very well. I congratulate the member for Johnston; I thought he did a terrific job.
I thank all public servants who appeared before the committee, and the efforts that they went to, to provide the answers. As the member for Blain was saying, he was conscious, when he was preparing his questions, that some public servant, somewhere, would be providing an answer - as we always were in opposition, because we knew that we were going to be keeping people busy for quite some time, when we were putting those questions in advance to the government.
Finally, the officers of the Assembly, who go the extra mile when it is required, and they certainly did on this occasion. My personal thanks to officers who supported and assisted me throughout the Estimates Committee process, those from Racing, Gaming and Licensing, the Department of Employment, Education and Training, and the Northern Territory Police. My final thanks and special mention to the Under Treasurer, Ms Jennifer Prince, whose thorough understanding - and sometimes you wish you could excise a part of someone else’s brain and just hook it into the back of your head; it might make things a bit easier. Certainly, in the case of the brain that Jennifer Prince carries around in her head, there are certain parts of it that I would like transplanted into mine, if it were possible. Unfortunately, she has gained that level of expertise over many years of experience, and a level that I would never aspire to achieve. However, I hope, over time, to at least get a greater understanding of all of these matters than I currently have. I am pleased that we have someone like Jennifer Prince who we have the opportunity to learn from.
Overall, I am very encouraged. We never said we were going to get it perfect first up, and it is clear we have not; but we are not that far from it either. I hope that a process of review is an open brainstorming session, that we get lots of ideas from to improve it and to ensure, at the end of the day, that every minister comes before that committee in future.
Dr LIM: Mr Chairman, I feel I need to say a few words about the whole process that we have had the last three days. I do not wish to be adversarial by any means. I believe the estimates process can be, indeed, a very useful manner through which we can interrogate the budgets from now until whenever we decide to change the process once again. However, it is my belief also that the system was flawed right from the very beginning. The intention of setting up this Estimates Committee process was to improve on what was previously used by the former government.
That system had to be the benchmark. Using that as the benchmark, there were nine ministers, interrogated by seven opposition members during most years. For whatever reasons, I believe that the human resource aspects of the then opposition impacted immensely on the process that occurred when the CLP budgets were interrogated by the Labor opposition. They had seven people; they had to interrogate nine ministers with their many portfolios. I recall that, in the eight years that I have been in this Chamber, frequently - not all the time, but frequently - questions were asked and answers were accepted without any supplementary questions; hence, the process moved along quite rapidly. The questions were already handed out as written questions and the ministers had prepared their responses to them. Very occasionally, there were supplementaries, but the supplementaries were not very inquisitorial or did not require the minister to respond in depth.
This time around, we had 10 opposition members, two Independent members, and members of the government backbench who were also interested in asking questions. Of the 10 members of the opposition, five of us were in Cabinet previously, so had a fairly good understanding of the budgetary process, particularly the former Treasurer. The 10 of us worked very hard to produce meaningful questions - questions that went very, very deep into the rationale of the budget. Using our expertise, we were able to ask the questions that would elicit appropriate and accurate information, provided the information was given by the respondent.
The Chief Minister was in the chair for 12, 14 hours - however many hours that she might have been there. I thought that a lot of it was partly of her own making, in that she was not able to respond to many of the questions because she did not have a great grasp of accrual accounting and she needed a lot of advice from the people around her. If anybody had taken the time to measure how much of the 14 hours she took as pauses while she discussed responses with her officers, it would suggest that the Chief Minister would have not been in the chair any longer than the former Chief Minister or the former Treasurer had been on their feet during the time of the CLP government. So, I do not believe that there was any justification for the government members to accuse the opposition today of time wasting, squandering, and being poor time managers, as they all suggested.
Yesterday, when we received the letter handed in by the Leader of Government Business to the Chairman of the Estimates Committee, and the second paragraph accused the opposition of squandering time, I thought it was very inflammatory, and it made me very angry. I believe that is was highly inappropriate of the minister to have done that. To then offer the opposition all the written answers within the hour - which did occur - would suggest to me that all that paperwork was already ready in the minister’s offices, probably days ahead. That process could have been expedited, as the member for Macdonnell said, even late last week. We provided the questions in the appropriate format, plus all the generic questions on all portfolios, as requested by the secretariat. So we did not do anything deliberate or mischievous to cause the government any grief. What we did was follow the requests of the secretariat.
The generic questions which appear to now have caused some difficulties were provided because they were very useful in eliciting, first of all, the depth of knowledge that the ministers may or may not have of their portfolios. It also allowed the opposition to determine the veracity of the figures in the documents that were produced in the budget. And, did we not show that many of the figures were flawed? That is the purpose of interrogating a budget. Had the Chief Minister not used the 14 hours that she did, and had we been provided with the written responses earlier than last night, things might have gone a lot quicker.
Then, as the day progressed today and time was running short, the minister for Community Development came to the Estimates Committee and started the filibuster. That was the most inappropriate behaviour that I could think of. Questions were put to the minister who could have responded quickly but, instead, he just went off on several tangents. It got to the stage where, in order to allow more important portfolios to be interrogated as well, I chose not to ask the minister any questions at all. It was a pointless exercise, in my mind but, if that is the way he wants to demonstrate to Territorians that is how honestly he can run his portfolio, so be it. I will live with the unfortunate circumstance of not being able to interrogate my portfolio as well as I could have. And believe you me, I had a swathe of questions that I felt I needed to follow up, particularly on issues of FAGs, on local government reforms, on IHANT, and on many of the issues that are very pertinent to remote Northern Territory, which I understand the minister himself is very interested in.
We all accept that the Chairman did a particularly good job. I congratulated him on that. It was a long three days for him to sit there. However, there were times when I felt the Chairman was not as impartial as he should have been. At times, he interjected when he, as the Chairman, should have remained silent. In fact, had you counted the number of minutes that the Chairman used himself in the three days that we were in the Estimates Committee, you will find that he would have consumed a significant amount of time. I thought that was something that the Chairman could address himself at a later date. Maybe he should buy Joske’s book on how to chair committees, and read through that and learn a few things about the art of managing a committee.
The Leader of Government Business said that he expected that the opposition would have a tag team of sorts to sit in the Estimates Committee to interrogate ministers as they came through. Why did he anticipate that? We had a strong team of 10 people who were prepared to work hard and support each other to look at this budget thoroughly. It does not matter if his past experience in this Chamber reminded him that, whenever the CLP government was being quizzed about the budget, there was usually one opposition spokesman standing on this side of the Chamber asking the minister on the other side. We had a strong team who were all equally interested in all the different portfolios and were prepared to spend the time supporting each other, providing questions and supplementary questions for the ministers.
It is important for the Deputy Chief Minister to understand that, here he is trying to bring a better system, so he says, believing that the old system was bad, and then somehow saying: ‘We have to throw it out; we will not use that as a benchmark’ yet, in the same breath saying: ‘We have to compare it with what the CLP did’. I thought the old system was reasonably okay, but the estimates system can be improved and made more efficient. I believe that the time that is allowed for estimates is insufficient. Unless written responses are provided earlier, this is going to be the way it will continue next time around. Once the written responses were provided to me last night, I had the opportunity to sit there, read them and digest the answers.
I was a bit put out when I found that several of the answers which included references to charts and other attachments, were missing those attachments. It made the responses incomplete and I could not consider those answers in any aspect whatsoever. It was not until this morning that a whole swag of papers then arrived literally on my lap for me to consider, when I had other issues to deal with at the same time. It is important that, when responses are provided to the shadow minister for consideration, that the full set of documentation is provided. I am sure the government will now take it on board for future reference.
The Estimates Committee, the core members of the PAC, have indeed worked very hard since June when we went to Tasmania to look at a system that was considered to be good. We came back pretty unanimous on what we wanted to see happen here. I recall, very clearly, that government members were interested in having two committees running in parallel for the duration of three or four days. Some of us were not interested in having two committees running in parallel because we wanted to be present right through the whole estimates process, and having two committees means we had to literally make a choice as to which committee we sit on. Some of us recommended that the committee process took at least the full five days of the week during which we could interrogate all ministers. However, that was not to be and we have what we have today.
What happened then is we have 1 ministers not interrogated through the public hearings system. Some of the responses to our questions are inadequate, and I am certain the answers to the Health minister and to Minister for Infrastructure, Planning and Environment would also be found wanting and needed supplementary questions. This is where, I believe, had the written answers been provided earlier, we could have moved through the process fairly quickly, determine what needed to be pursued, and supplementary questions put to those to get to the core of the whole issue. That would have made the whole process a lot better.
It has been learning curve for all of us. There are better ways of doing things. This is not a good way. Running out of time was really the most unfortunate aspect of the whole exercise for the three days. I would prefer the Chairman to be a little more impartial than he has been. Once those rough edges are ironed out, I believe things will be a lot better.
Mr MALEY: Mr Chairman, I would like to place on the record some of my comments and observations in relation to the budget Estimates Committee process. I can say that, in a very general way to begin with, in my view, the committee system and the process which we endured over the past three days is a form of empowering parliament, and enhances the very concept of parliamentary democracy. It is a very good mechanism which the Territory community, through their members of parliament, can scrutinise the Territory budget. I would like to say all the members who contributed - there are a few exceptions - should be congratulated for their hard work. There was a huge amount of effort that went into the drafting of the questions and almost as much, it seems, into drafting many of the answers.
The budget Estimates Committee is an important safeguard, and one which should be cherished and refined so that the most benefit can be derived from the system. Unlike some of the behaviour in this Chamber, most of the time, the Estimates Committee was conducted in an efficient manner and many of the people involved behaved in a statesman-like manner. The only difficulty, of course, is that the time restraints placed on the committee made it impossible to really go through every single facet of the budget. It made it impossible to test many of the important aspects of the 2002-03 budget. There seems to have been a systemic failure of the committee process, boiling down to a lack of time.
Another concern was that there seemed a lack of interest and any real contribution made by the backbenchers of the current government. Backbenchers are all too often reluctant to speak up against the government and its ministers as this may create the impression of some party disunity, and that person then, of course, reduces their chances of becoming a minister or leader. What occurs then is an executive government and not parliamentary government, since the executive, of course, control the purse strings. They make all the decisions, and it is viewed, certainly historically and from a political science perspective, as an unhealthy system.
I am not going to repeat the comments made by the member for Katherine. I can confirm, certainly from my perspective in the shadow portfolios for which I am responsible for - with the vote both for the Department of Justice and also relating to the Department of Business, Industry and Resource Development - that there were many, many questions which were left unasked. I appreciated many of the detailed answers I received. However, I was not afforded an opportunity, on behalf of the Northern Territory people, to ask further questions and really scrutinise the budget in detail.
I suppose this review of the budget Estimates Committee falls within the scope of an agenda which I am promoting for a general parliamentary review. There has to be a greater and more efficient role for the backbenchers of the government, and an opportunity afforded to the opposition to test these type of processes and to enhance the budget situation. We should continually try to find ways to reform and renew our particular parliamentary democracy.
Politics must be about policies, not personalities. It should be about issues, not sound bites, and it should relate to a substance, not spin. There comes a time where, unfortunately, human nature being what it is, some ministers start believing there own rhetoric. I was, as a Deputy Chairman, particularly concerned to hear a report from the member for Nelson - who is a good and decent man and a person I have known most of my adult life - on the subject of what could loosely be described as the threatening, bordering on abusive, manner by the Deputy Chief Minister. That is really disgraceful and the lowest point that was reached during of the course of the Estimates Committee. It shows clearly that, by singling out such a good and decent man for that type of abuse, that person has no regard for the role and view of backbenchers and other members of this parliament. He is a person who is in the process of believing some of his own rhetoric.
Backbenchers and you, Mr Chairman, touched upon the performance of the Chairman of the committee. I can say, in a very general way, that I thought that the committee was run in a fairly efficient and fair manner. However, once again there was, from the Chair, this lack of confidence of offending some of the executive and ministers who were before the committee perhaps, and that may have had an effect on the way that some of things were said, criticising the process, as opposed to being a genuine part of a parliamentary democracy. A person who is not part of the corporate entity, be it in government, or be it a backbencher in government, should be in a position to have the confidence to say what he thinks, to behave fairly, and not have to fear retribution of the form that the member for Nelson had to clearly endure from the Deputy Chief Minister.
The process is certainly on the way to being a good one and, with some fair and objective reforms, it is really going to advance, in my view, the scrutiny of the entire budgetary process. I support the committee system; I support a comprehensive review; and I support, without going into details, an extension of the current system. Questions are provided to the executive. If answers are going to be provided, then there should be sufficient time to read them, to properly formulate supplementary questions. In the course of preparing my questions, I had an opportunity to read the Hansard from previous debates in this House which were not hamstrung by limitations on time. It was fairly obvious that, although some of the questions were well worded and work had gone into them. they were merely parroted out. An answer was given and, clearly, the person asking the question did not have the understanding - it seemed on many occasions - to ask that supplementary question to properly test the budget, and the member of parliament who is in that executive position who is really the government. That is the real difference and, probably, the real reason why this particular opposition utilised so much time, because there is a real capacity to have a follow-up question. That capacity did not exist and that is evident from the Hansard, from the last serious budget, when the now government, were in opposition.
With those comments, Mr Deputy Chairman, I look forward to the review occurring and next year, being in a position to endorse totally the revised and reformed process.
Ms CARNEY: Mr Deputy Chairman, I will be brief. I wanted to record a couple of things, because I thought I probably should in the circumstances. I wanted to endorse wholeheartedly the comments and suggestions made by the member for Katherine. I plan to do so and to comment on a couple of other things, in a similar tone.
As a new politician, I found the process absolutely fascinating. I, strangely, enjoyed it; I thought it was very interesting. I cannot say that I have ever really got into budgets or balance sheets. I am the type of person who, in business, simply rang the accountant to ask whether I was making money or not. So, for me, the learning curve has really been extraordinary. To that extent, I am very grateful for this opportunity.
In relation to the process generally, I thought it was good. As a new member of parliament, I am not terribly interested in what has happened in the past. In fact, I do not give a toss. I am interested in where we go from here. As I said, the process was generally good.
I pick up briefly a couple of things that the Chief Minister mentioned. Having sat there for a lot of the time - and I think I was there for probably between 80% to 90% of the time - I did not think that the questioning was aggressive. I did not think that public servants were given a hard time, nor did I think the atmosphere was venomous. I thought that the public servants were treated with courtesy by both sides. Occasionally, people would forget to ask questions through the minister. It seemed, from my observations, that that was just human nature coming into it. When you are essentially having dialogue with someone, it is very difficult to then look the other way and direct your question around the corner, as it were. From my observations, I did not see anything deliberate or wrong with the way members asked questions, occasionally, inadvertently to public servants. I thought we all did the best we could in the circumstances. I did not think any member was perfect - none of us were perfect. It really was a ‘suck it and see’ exercise: new government, new opposition, new process.
For my part, I was decidedly unhappy that I was unable to ask supplementary questions in one shadow portfolio in particular; that was Correctional Services. In relation to tourism, that is an enormous portfolio and I was terribly disappointed that I had to chop down an enormous number of supplementary questions. I do not know how many I asked, but it would have been no greater than six or seven. I recall that, when we were having this debate in the parliament only a few weeks ago, I said that I was concerned that I would have between, and I quote: ‘20 to 40 minutes with the minister for Tourism’. The Deputy Chief Minister said, in his reply, and I quote: ‘No one is suggesting you only have 30 minutes or 40 minutes’ with him. I think I had 25 minutes, so my prediction turned out to be right and, to that extent, it was terribly disappointing.
I found the conduct of the government pretty dreadful last night, in changing the goalposts. Changing the goalposts in any exercise invariably gets up my nose, and it certainly did. It seemed to me that the government knew that its system was going pear-shaped and it used political spin, political opportunism, to blame the opposition. The letter was inflammatory. It was provided to the Chairman of the committee who did not, even as a matter of courtesy, discuss the matter with his committee colleagues. That was unconscionable in my view. It was clearly political, and that was, for me, the most disappointing part of the entire process …
Mr Stirling: So you didn’t want the answers. Okay. We won’t do that in future.
Ms CARNEY: … especially when one considers that the Hansard will show this forever and a day - when you have finished, Deputy Chief Minister - that one question was ruled inadmissible. Out of all of the time that I spent there, I cannot recall any question being objected to on the basis of relevance. This is something that the government will have to live with.
I noticed the Chairman’s cricket analogies. I am a great cricket fan - described as a cricket tragic - and so I will follow his analogy. Objectively, my observations were that the opposition played with a straight bat and then, mid-way through the game, the rules were changed, and that was the only disappointing part of the exercise. Of course, the conduct of the Deputy Chief Minister in terms of his discussions with the member for Nelson was also unconscionable.
Mr Stirling: As was your behaviour last night. You went within an inch of being thrown out, and you should have been!
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: Order!
Ms CARNEY: When you’ve finished, Deputy Chief Minister.
Mr Stirling: You should have been thrown out of that Chamber. Your behaviour was disgraceful because you had been drinking and you cannot handle it. You should not drink in future.
Ms CARNEY: How dare you accuse me of that! I …
Mr BALDWIN: A point of order, Mr Deputy Chairman!
Mr Stirling: You could smell it! I was 15 feet away!
Mr BALDWIN: A point of order, Mr Deputy Chairman! The Leader of Government Business has just accused my colleague of drinking, and I would ask you to ask him to withdraw that.
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: I ask the Deputy Chief Minister to withdraw.
Mr STIRLING: Why should I, if it is a fact?
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: I think you should withdraw. You should not make any personal reference to anybody in this Chamber.
Mr STIRLING: Well, her behaviour was unconscionable.
Mr BALDWIN: How do you know she had been drinking? Prove it.
Mr DEPUTY CHAIRMAN: You should not do that. Now, please withdraw.
Mr STIRLING: I will withdraw, Mr Deputy Chairman.
Mr Baldwin: So you should.
Ms CARNEY: Thank you, Mr Deputy Chairman. It is really unfortunate that the Deputy Chief Minister becomes very excited when some pressure is put on. That is a matter for him; he is the one who needs to sleep well at night. I know how well I sleep.
Getting back to the matters at hand, as a new member of parliament, as I said at the outset, I did find the process fascinating and I look forward to the government having the good grace to pick up on some of the very sensible suggestions made by the member for Katherine.
Mr WOOD: Mr Deputy Chairman, one could start off in cricketing terms and say bad light stopped play, but otherwise, I shall continue.
I thank all members for the tenor of tonight. I was not actually going to speak. I thought we were going to have a great sparring match but, in general there has been a lot of support for the process, and I need to put it on record as well. I congratulate the government. I have said it before that I think the Estimates Committee is a great idea. It is very important that we keep this process going, but we have to be aware that it is a public process and I am mindful of the some of the changes that we were looking at. For instance, without getting into the argument of not enough time, one of the dangers of bringing in a whole pile of questions and then just basically saying that they are all answered and they go to Hansard, is that you take away the ability of the public - and that could just be the media; it may not be anyone - to be able to hear that question.
The other day, I was reading Warren Snowdon’s contribution to the debate on stem cells. He was complaining that, at his stage of the debate, he had been asked to go to the committee rooms and the problem was the committee rooms was that it was not being broadcast. He said the very same thing: only those who will bother to go and pick up the Hansard will every know what he said whereas, if he could be broadcast it, there was a fair chance that people would hear it. The one thing we have to watch in all this debate, no matter if we want three hours or 23 hours or 230 hours, is that it should be there for the public, not us. It is important for us, but it should be there for the public and that should be the key.
Some of the problems that we have had in the last few days have resulted because this system is new; it is different from the past. I agree with the member for Araluen: I really do not care too much about the past. It is important to some extent, but we have moved on to a far more public process. We now include members of departments - CEO’s and advisors - and that is great. It also gives us a chance to ask them questions directly, which a lot of times you would never be able to do. It is a learning curve for the government. They are now in a process where they have to be able to answer questions that come back from the other side. They are also learning the process themselves, because it is a new government. Also we are dealing with a new type of budget, an accrual budget - maybe I should call it a cruel budget, because for some of us it has been that - but it is a process we are all learning and, therefore, there are going to be some hiccups.
If I may make some small suggestions; I realise there is likely to be a review. There are two things that stood out in my mind about how we could reduce the amount of time spent. There was a series of questions of the opposition, which were standard questions for every department, and you would see them there as you go through. There either needs to be a way of actually being able to read those particular questions, and have multiple answers according to the departments - maybe that is one way to do it. Where you have these basically standard questions to each department, maybe there is some way we could combine those. There may be a chance to look at combining questions. If I had a question - and it happened on a couple of occasions – it might have been close to a question someone else had. Perhaps we could actually bring questions together and say they are on behalf of two, three or four people, and then supplementaries could come from each person. There is room for working on that part of it. Also, in replies to questions. At times, instead of a minister saying: ‘A, B, C, D, $100, $200, $300, $400, end of question’, there would be a preamble that would say what a wonderful job the government is doing, how beautiful the sky is, what a lovely day it is. Sometimes there was a bit too much extra added to the question that really did not need to be there. We could tighten it up on both sides and, talking as an experienced waffler here, I should know.
The other thing is that there was some talk about behaviour. I am not judging anyone in this particular matter, but last night I almost felt ashamed to be a politician. I thought last night’s behaviour on both sides was woeful - just straight out woeful. I am not making judgments on either side, but I reckon, when you have the public and members of departments there, so close to you, they must have thought we were low lives. If we cannot have a decent debate without getting to the extent we did last night, we can only blame ourselves if people think politicians are not the greatest people on this earth. If we are going to make a better parliament by having a look at an Estimates Committee, and if we are thinking we are improving things, perhaps we have to improve our behaviour. By all means, good vigorous debate, I have no problem with that. However, last night at 11.30 pm, I thought it was fairly atrocious. I just could not believe what was going on. I hope that can be part of the review: that we try to do things a little better and a little more civilly.
I enjoyed it as well. The member for Araluen said it was a learning curve. I actually found it great. I did not get bored. I am disappointed that the questions had to be put into a shortened period, and we could not speak on them all, but I was learning. It might have been 14 hours for the Treasurer, but I must admit, listening to the advice that she was giving, I started to learn about the budget process and about matters - I am like the member for Araluen, I really could not care too much about budgets. I want to learn, because it means I do a better job as a parliamentarian. It is certainly an educational thing, especially for new members.
I would like to put on record my thanks to a lot of people. There have been some comments about the Chairman. Mr Chairman of the committee, I might have some minor complaints about things but, overall, I thought you did a great job. People sometimes say: ‘Well you said a few things in a biased manner’; well you happen to be a member of a party. It is probably a good reason for having independent Speakers, but so what?
A member: They want him to be a Liberal.
Mr WOOD: Is he? Oh, right.
I thought you did a very good job, and that is not sucking up to you, Mr Chairman, but I think you did.
Dr Burns: Thank you, I do too.
Mr WOOD: I would also like to thank all the public servants. There is one sitting over in the corner. I am told you are not allowed to name them. Thanks for the amount of work they must have done in answering all the questions. It was hard enough, sometimes, writing the questions, so I suppose it must have been worse trying to answer them. To Terry Hanley and Ros Vogeli, to all the Hansard staff and all the Assembly staff as well. I would also like to thank my half of a research officer. I probably should call her Loz, and the Speaker can call her Davies. I thank her for the work she has done in helping to prepare questions.
Overall, it has been great. I should make one other comment: I have enjoyed the rapport between myself, as a member of the committee, and different ministers. I make an example of the Deputy Chief Minister, as the Minister for Employment, Education and Training. There were some questions about the possibility of teacher training. You can have that toing and froing in this process, and it does make you feel as though you can have some input into government policy. If they do not agree with you, they are certainly going to tell you. There were times when the minister believed some of the ideas I put forward were of merit, and that at least makes you feel that you are of some benefit in this process, and I think that is great.
So, all in all, all right, there are some hiccups in it. I do believe we need a longer time period, there is no doubt about that. I went to Tasmania, I saw the system. Far better to have extra time and a bit left over, than not enough time, because the public will have confidence in it. We get complaints that we do not work here long enough. Four days one week and three days the next week, so what? That is what we get paid for; I cannot see a great problem with that. I would like to see it out of the sittings. It is much better out of the sittings. We do the sittings some other time, even it is only sit for a day just to fix up the bits and pieces at the beginning and the end. I would like to put it on record permanently. It was good, I enjoyed the process, I just think we need some refining, and one of the major refinements is that there is some extra time.
Mr BALDWIN: Mr Deputy Chairman, I agree with a lot of what the member for Nelson has said. There have been a lot of good suggestions in the debate on the report here tonight. Certainly my colleague, the member for Katherine, put forward some suggestions. It is quite good to see those come through and that there is willingness on both sides - or on three sides with the member for Nelson - to work to a resolution. The process that has been started can be refined quite considerably to provide a better outcome.
I pick up on one thing the member for Nhulunbuy talked about. It rang a warning bell for me when he said he did not like to have all these members sitting opposite him or the other ministers asking questions. That sounds like – sound like, does not quite taste like yet - he may be thinking of restricting the number of members who can ask questions of ministers. That would be a crying shame for the process that has begun. Perhaps it is intimidating for ministers sitting there having questions fired at them, but that was no different to the other process that we had in place in this House. I would be most uncomfortable if that happened; that members were restricted in any way, shape or form, from having the ability to ask questions - all sitting there at their leisure to ask those questions. If that is the line he is thinking well, then, it raises the question of what he would do to an Independent member to give equal time that he may restrict to members of the opposition. Perhaps you will end up just having slotted times where you can appear and that would be a terrible thing, I am sure. The Leader of the Opposition also talked about the hours once again. We have heard these arguments. I am not going to dwell on them, except to say this issue was raised extensively in the debate leading up to the formation of this Estimates Committee. I guess it is fair to say that, for this estimates at least, we have 10 very …
Mr Stirling: If you are referring to me, I am not the Leader of the Opposition.
Mr BALDWIN: The Leader of Government Business, sorry, you just remind me of the Leader of the Opposition when …
Mr Stirling: You are the opposition.
Mr BALDWIN: We have 10 very experienced members on this side, and he was quoting the last few budget debates in this House: 28 hours and all of those statistics. We have eight members on this side who have been in government; five who have been in executive government, so why wouldn’t we have the ability to raise many questions and know the workings of government?
The Leader of Government Business also referred a time when there was 41 hours in 1996 and 41-odd hours in 1997. I t is far from me to say, but those were the days when Mr Bell, Mr Bailey and - I think from memory, both those years or perhaps one, but I think both – Mr Parish were in this House. Albeit what they were saying was sometimes hard to take, they were very hard workers and scrutinised the budget very extensively, and with quite a bit of experience in the case of, certainly, Mr Bell and Mr Bailey. That may account, you would assume, for those longer periods there of 41-odd hours. So, we are not asking any different to that sort of consideration.
The Chief Minister also thanked the public servants, and I do also for the hard work they have put into this. I know the sort of work they are put through when they get these amounts of questions. I am glad that they were there, in fact, because a number of times we saw where ministers could not answer questions - and this is the process - and they had to turn to those officers to get the required answers, and they did so. The public servants, obviously, very professionally provided the information as they could. But that was a time consuming process, as it has been pointed out. The Chief Minister also apologised to them. Well, I think that is a bit cynical. I do not recall any of us attacking the public servants. In fact, all of us have great respect for those public servants and the job they do, particularly in the environment of a budget estimates process, or review, as in the past.
She also mentioned the venomous atmosphere, and I do not recall it being any more venomous than what we used to go through from them when they were in opposition and we were on that side going through the questioning. Repetition was mentioned, and I do not recall the Chairman pulling us up on repetition or, indeed, ruling out any questions that were not relevant.
As I said, the process does need some refinement and that, I am sure, we are going to get into at a later stage. The point that the member for Nelson is a very good one, but just recapping a little. That is, when the Leader of Government Business brought the answers to the questions in, looking for some way of showing that their process was going to work, because we had been spending some time quizzing, which he was not happy with, and we were getting some good issues up - and I will get to that in a moment. However, I agree with the member for Nelson in the fact that this is a public process. That is what the government, when they were in opposition, used to talk about as the most utmost plank of having an Estimates Committee: that the public could come in and listen to a question being asked and then listen to the answer being given. The problem with just providing the answers - and I have no problem with the answers being provided because it then allows more information to flow and more questions to be raised arising from those answers, and more answers given; so we provide more information to the public. But if you just incorporate, then that ability for the public to come in and understand and enjoy the questioning and the answering would be taken away. There should be some consideration, if that is going to happen, to somehow reading the question or a version of the question, and an answer being given before going on.
I assume that, perhaps, an apology has been given to the member for Nelson by the Leader of Government Business for talking to him in the way he did - the response from the member for Nelson being that he felt threatened, in his own words. Because the member for Nelson did not raise it himself just now in his contribution to this debate, I assume that an apology has been given and accepted - and I am glad, if that is the case. It was uncalled for, and fairly lousy, I think.
So when we did have time, in the early parts of the process, to inquire into this budget in some depth, we found out all sorts of interesting things. That is the type of good information that I am sure people are interested in. We found out fairly early on that there was a certificate of exemption given to Hawker Britton which was the company that conducted the Labor Party’s election campaign. We could not have it tabled, unfortunately, because I know - and the Attorney-General would know, because I think procurement sits with him now - that when you sign off on a C of E, there are two ministers involved: the one supporting the C of E and the one who has to give the final sign off. The reasons are given quite explicitly on that C of E as to why this company is the best for the job. It could well be that that C of E explains it very well. If it does, well, there is obviously nothing to hide. It would have been good to have a copy of that C of E, but we were not able to. That was an interesting piece of information coming out reasonably early.
Likewise, the two lecterns that were shipped up here at the expense of taxpayers because the Chief Minister felt she had to have matching lecterns. Other things such as we know now we cannot trust the time lines that are in Building a Better Territory. A few of those time lines have been tested now and are falling way and woefully behind schedule. We found out that cash estimates and the actuals were not available, even though the Budget Overview said that they were. Not only that, on a couple of minor occasions we were given the cash comparable figures so, obviously, they were available, but just given to us when it suited the government. That came out reasonably early, as well.
We also found that some departments, the ones that we inquired into in depth, under spent in 2001-02 and that the under spend was carried forward to some varying degrees in 2002-03. Some of the money lapsed, which is a nice way of saying Treasury gets hold of, it I guess. We also found that a couple of the departments overspent and transacted more cash than they had at hand, and they carried forward, indeed, a deficit cash component. That, perhaps, is worthy of some further inquiry.
We also found there are some mistakes in the budget papers - quite glaring mistakes. In fact, the longer we went into it, the more and more we found. Some of them are quite considerable amounts. The Chief Minister was very coy about answering whether or not she could confirm that these budget books were, indeed, valid without mistake. We found very many of those. The solution to that has been offered up, and it will be good to see that solution taken up by the government.
We found that 15 roadside inns are going to lose subsidy money. Then we inquired a bit further and asked whether that was 27 roadside inns, because that is what the web site said. When I, in fact …
Dr BURNS: You would know where they all are.
Mr BALDWIN: Yes I do, most of them are in my electorate. You would not know where they are.
When I tried to assist the minister for Licensing, when he had, not only the Commissioner of Taxation but also the Director of Licensing at the table with him - and it could have been one question, one quick answer - he refused to do that. That is all right, it is just going to cause more work for the Commissioner of Taxation, which is unfortunate, but there you have it.
We also learnt that there have been cuts to the Primary Industry and Fisheries budget - quite significant cuts, and particularly quite massive cuts into our research farms. In their budgets, 18% cuts to the research farms, that is fairly critical. We find out that one of the ways that they are going to live with those cuts is that they are going to sell their produce and collect the revenues from that. Well, anyone who has been in farming will know that that is a dicey thing to put in a budget: to say: ‘Here, boys, we are going to take some money off you; you go out and make your own way on a research farm basis, and see if you can build up your cash by selling your produce’. I wish them luck. I know they are very capable people on those research farms and, if they have to, will find a way. We also know that there have been a number of jobs lost in the DPIF area - 38 we established, just in that area alone. There are 38 jobs gone …
A member: DBIRD.
Mr BALDWIN: In the Primary Industry area of DBIRD. When I inquired into those, I was accused of accusing the minister of saying that those people had been done away with. That was not my interest, I just wanted to know how many were not there that were supposed to be there. Perhaps the minister might, while he is slashing budgets and cutting the jobs in the Primary Industry and Fisheries area, he might like to give back the two DLOs that are in his office. The two of them, I am sure could be used quite handily out in the department, rather than having to do his work up in the office, particularly with the numbers dwindling throughout that whole agency.
The other thing we learnt is that the government is going to – or may - may trial cotton in the Daly Basin. The minister refused to give an undertaking to disallow that happening. That is within his power, that is his right, but I find that very unfortunate that he would not do that, because that is of grave concern to me, if we allow the trialling. Indeed, in the minister’s words: ‘… the trialling to establish the commercial viability of cotton in the Daly Basin region’, is just amazing that we are going to let that happen.
On Port Keats’ pool, I have an answer from the minister - very disappointing. This is one of the things about answers, that you have to live with them. I am not sure people at Port Keats are going to be very happy about this. I asked the minister responsible for the Department of Community Development, Sport and Cultural Affairs whether the money that had been promised for the Palumpa rodeo arena was going to be granted in this year’s budget, and the answer I got was ‘No’. However, I am aware that promise was made by the candidate for Daly. I noticed that he was up there – no, he is gone - giving you people the support you deserve. It is a pity he is not here. Government is going to actually honour the promise for the rodeo arena at Palumpa but, in the term of government. The fact is that, when the election was on, the arena was being talked about. It is nearly been completed and they are still waiting for their $15 000, which was promised by the candidate. It talks about no amount of money: ‘No specific funding was promised’. Well, that is a promise and you have agreed to that, that is good.
The same promise was made at the same time, for the $300 000 for the Wadeye community. The answer I get when inquiring into that is: ‘The $300 000 was paid to the council in 2000 and 2001. There is no further funding to be provided in 2002-03’. Well, let me remind you on that side, that the funding in 2000 and 2001 was in their bank accounts well before the election. Then, along came your candidate during the election, and promised another $300 000, and you have to honour that. So, Chief Minister, that is another one you have to honour. I would be glad if you could ask your Minister for Community Development if he will have another look at that because, as you know, they are keen to get on with that job and have it completed. In fact, the $300 000 would make sure, at the end of the day, it is a very worthy construction.
Mr Chairman, having run out of time, I also congratulate all the members of the PAC, the Hansard, government officials, members opposite for doing a reasonably good job, and my own colleagues for a very good job in a process that does need refinement.
Ms CARTER: Mr Chairman, a couple of comments. I have fairly mixed feelings as to how the week has gone. I, like many, knew we were going to run out of time. I have been disappointed and I put that on the record earlier. We were not going to have the open-ended time frame that has always been available here in the Northern Territory for the examination by parliament of the budget. I know the government has used previous budget processes and debates to come up with the approximately 30 hours that we were provided with, but the week showed that that needs revision. Looking back to the past as to how those numbers came up, really did not end up being appropriate.
One of the reasons for that was the way the venue, where we had the activity, has changed. My recollection of two previous budget processes was that, here in the Chamber, you would have a few members on one side, the minister and a couple of others perhaps, on the other - maybe six or seven people at the most in the Chamber at a time - and it went along in a way of question, answer, question, answer, in that process, without too many other people interjecting or adding in supplementaries. The way the room was set up for this process was quite different. Anyone who has communications skills should have been able to pick up how, doing it the way we have done this week, was going to actually encourage people to talk. We were not having to stand up and sit down, stand up sit down, throughout the process; there was much more of a flow of information and discussion.
As we have already picked up earlier, it was somewhat disconcerting, from time to time, having to remember to put your questions through the Chair and through the minister, when you might have been talking eyeball to eyeball with one of the public servants, getting some answers from them, for example. So the way the room was set up enhanced communication which, I think, was one of the reasons why, at the start of the week, there was such a desire to actually explore the budget and to delve deeply into some of the issues that were coming up.
Also, of course, government was well aware the number of questions that the opposition had lodged was quite a significant number and were quite complex as well. There were indications along the way that the time frame was going to be inadequate. Like many of the members here, and on both sides I am sure, I found the process very interesting, as I have found it in the past. It is an excellent learning experience to be able to gather more information about what the various departments do. To that degree, it was disappointing that our ability to question ministers was reduced and that cut down on the sort of information that we were able to learn.
Personally, I was quite pleased when we were provided with the answers yesterday. Obviously, it would have been more beneficial to get them on the Tuesday, as soon as we could have, so that we could examine them more carefully. However, it was certainly very interesting to receive those answers. My area that I concentrated on was Health and I did write a number of questions for that area and ask for tables to be provided. I was very pleased with the standard of information and the complexity of those tables which were provided by the minister for Health. Her staff are to be applauded for that.
With the questions that I wrote, I did write quite a number of supplementary questions which we could not get to today. I have been able to submit them and I have been grateful for that ability. I am quite sure that the minister will get back to me with some of the answers to those important questions.
I believe that the government does owe it to us and Territorians - through the opposition because that is our job to question the budget - the ability to be able to question the budget until, basically, all of our questions have been exhausted. I hope that when the review is conducted that that sort of need is taken into very serious consideration.
I was disappointed that we were unable to get to the Minister for Lands and Planning. In my electorate of Port Darwin the issue of planning is very important, and I was keen to witness the examination of the budget area in that part and to have asked a few supplementary questions. So, that was disappointing to miss his area. He also covers a number of other very important areas, and it is a real shame that we missed out on that particular minister.
To conclude, I would like to express my thanks to the ministers - in particular the Minister for Health and Community Services and the staff who provided information over the past week. Also, special thanks to the staff of the Legislative Assembly. I have certainly been aware, over the last couple of weeks, of the extraordinary amount of work that has gone into this process. I know that they will be looking very carefully at how they can streamline the efforts that they have put in over the past few weeks. I am quite sure that the system of gathering questions and formatting them can be made simpler. I hope that next year it is not quite such an onerous task as I know it has been this year. I would also like to thank those people who must remain nameless, who assisted the opposition in the formation of some of our questions. I conclude by thanking the staff of the Leader of the Opposition’s office who have also worked very long and very hard in assisting us in the preparation of our questions for this activity.
Mr CHAIRMAN: The question is that the proposed expenditure be agreed to, and that the resolution or expressions of opinion as agreed to by the committee in relation to the proposed expenditure be noted..
Motion agreed to.
Remainder of the bill agreed to.
Bill to reported; report adopted.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bill read a third time.
SUSPENSION OF STANDING ORDERS
Take Five Bills Together
Take Five Bills Together
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent five bills entitled Taxation (Administration) Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 90), Stamp Duty Amendment Bill (No 2) 2002 (Serial 91), Debits Tax Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 92), Mineral Royalty Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 93), and Pay-roll Tax Amendment Bill (No 2) 2002 (Serial 94) passing through all stages at this sittings.
Motion agreed to.
SUSPENSION OF STANDING ORDERS
Pass all Stages
Pass all Stages
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent a bill entitled Financial Management Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 88) passing through all stages at this sittings.
Motion agreed to.
SUSPENSION OF STANDING ORDERS
Pass all Stages
Pass all Stages
Mr STIRLING (Racing, Gaming and Licensing): Madam Speaker, I move that so much of standing orders be suspended as would prevent bills entitled Gaming Control Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 82) and Gaming Machine Amendment Bill 2002 (Serial 83), passing through all stages at this sittings.
Motion agreed to.
TAXATION (ADMINISTRATION) AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 90)
STAMP DUTY AMENDMENT BILL (No 2)
(Serial 91)
DEBITS TAX AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 92)
MINERAL ROYALTY AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 93)
PAY-ROLL TAX AMENDMENT BILL (No 2)
(Serial 94)
(Serial 90)
STAMP DUTY AMENDMENT BILL (No 2)
(Serial 91)
DEBITS TAX AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 92)
MINERAL ROYALTY AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 93)
PAY-ROLL TAX AMENDMENT BILL (No 2)
(Serial 94)
Continued from 21 August 202.
Mr REED (Katherine): Madam Speaker, the opposition will be supporting these bills and, from the point of view the details of them, there is little point in going through and repeating it, virtually in relation to what has already been advised to the House in the second reading speech.
There are a number of items which are incorporated and covered in this legislation in relation to franchises, the exemption of certain corporate reconstructions, the removal of hiring duty on wet hire, special hiring arrangements, clarifying the tax of acquisitions for partnership interests, and communication of information with Registrar of Motor Vehicles - which is an appropriate course to take in terms of advice to be provided to the Motor Vehicle Registry by the taxes office - clarifying the leases outgoings and not subject to duty, and voluntary transfers of business pursuant to the Financial Sector (Transfer of Business) Act and land rich anti-avoidance provisions. Whilst these are, in overall terms, fairly complex issues, the amendments themselves are fairly straightforward. I would ask the Chief Minister and Treasurer whether or not she could indicate to the House for those items for which it is appropriate, the level of liaison that has been undertaken with business and industry or other like interested groups, and the extent to which they may have indicated their support, or suggestions that may have been adopted in relation to this legislation.
I foreshadow that we will be, likewise, supporting the amendment schedule No 22, from the point of view of expediting the process of this legislation. Bearing in mind the work that we have been through and, in particular, the fact that Assembly staff have been working very hard over not just this week to facilitate the Estimates Committee, but leading up to that, Madam Speaker, to accord to them some fairness in not keeping them too late, the Chief Minister and Treasurer might want to consider moving the amendments as a whole, and we would be supportive of that,
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I thank the shadow Treasurer for his comments on this. These are a number of stamp duty measures, some which really are clarification, some that are responding to anomalies. The former Treasurer probably realised that a number of these things do emerge over a year, and it is an opportunity when we are doing the budget debate, to put some of those clarifications in place. A number of them have emerged from business over the year. Certainly, as far as any amendments we have in front of us tonight, either they have emerged because of those anomalies or lack of clarification in stamp duty measures, or with some we have taken the initiative of working with business - like the renewal of franchises, something that was causing considerable grief in the business community - and I know are highly welcomed by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. The issues of wet hires and corporate reconstruction were also specifically raised by industry. This government is very happy to respond to that.
I thank you for your support for these. They are sensible measures; and ones that respond to business and how Territory business can go about doing their business. I thank the opposition for their support.
Motion agreed to; bills read a second time.
In committee:
Taxation (Administration) Amendment Bill (Serial 90):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
Ms MARTIN: Mr Chairman, I move that amendments contained in Schedule 22 be moved together.
Amendments agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Bill to be reported with amendments.
Stamp Duty Amendment Bill (No 2) (Serial 91):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole.
Ms MARTIN: Mr Chairman, I propose the following amendments to the bill. Clause 4 of the bill repeals the old stamp duty First Home Owner Concession with a threshold of $80 000, and introduces a new First Home Owner Concession with a threshold of $125 000, as well as the $1500 stamp duty Principle Place of Resident rebate. Proposed section 8C, which deals with the stamp duty Principle Place of Resident rebate, contains an incorrect reference to the First Home Owner Concession. The proposed amendment corrects this reference, and I commend this amendment to honourable members.
Amendment agreed to.
Bill, as amended, agreed to.
Bill to be reported with an amendment.
Debits Tax Amendment Bill (Serial 92):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.
Bill to be reported without amendment.
Mineral Royalty Amendment Bill (Serial 93):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.
Bill to be reported without amendment.
Pay-roll Tax Amendment Bill (No 2) (Serial 94):
Bill, by leave, taken as a whole and agreed to.
Bill to be reported without amendment.
Bills reported, report adopted.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, I move that the bills now be read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bills read a third time.
FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 88)
(Serial 88)
Continued from 20 August 2002.
Mr REED (Katherine): In simple terms, Madam Speaker, the opposition supports this legislation. It is a move by the government to further enhance, in their view, the legislation, and we do not have any argument with that in what it will result in. In short, the legislation is supported.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer): Madam Speaker, with some surprise I say thank you to the Deputy Leader of the Opposition. I suppose, with such changes to the Financial Management Act, considering what had happened in estimates, I expected that there would be some testing of what we are doing here. These are very important, so I thank the opposition for their support.
These are the first stage of changes to the Financial Management Act, and they take us from the cash framework to the accrual. There are some important changes in terminology in this part of these amendments to the Financial Management Act, changing to the word ‘allocation’ in terms of how it is defined, rather than meaning ‘gross expenditure’, but now meaning ‘what is to be provided at a whole of agency level’; and a net of agency revenue for separate categories, such as output and capital purposes. We have looked at new terminology in the act, such as ‘purpose’, that will replace ‘activity’ in how we deal with allocations. The establishment for the Central Holding Authority which replaces the previous Consolidated Revenue Account; and the CHA in future will be where the government’s central pool of funds are; and that funding payments will come from that pool. There are some very major things here. It might not look like a substantial bill but, in how we move to the future, we have left behind …
Mr Reed: We have been talking about it all week, haven’t we?
Ms MARTIN: So these initial amendments to the Financial Management Act are important in how we move to the future, and they really do underpin what this 2002-03 budget is all about. It is a line in the sand and we are moving from a previous cash framework, and how that had legislation to support it in the Financial Management Act. Now we are moving to an accrual framework - a much more transparent and sophisticated framework, and one that will really serve to focus, not what cash going to agency is about, but what our outcomes are about. That is the really exciting part of the Accrual Working for Outcomes Framework. It is not about just where cash is going, it is about what we are getting for that allocation. It is certainly much more than cash, and a much more sophisticated and appropriate mechanism as we move into the 21st century.
I know, to say again, that the move to accruals has been a difficult one for us, as the parliamentarians. I do not necessarily think it is a difficult one for Treasury. They have embraced it wholeheartedly. We will, over the next two to three years, learn to understand it a lot better, and appreciate what value it actually adds to our budgets. So with these seemingly small amendments to the Financial Management Act, we actually are moving into a new era. It is very exciting, and I am proud to be Treasurer as we do it. I thank Treasury for all the hard work in this. It might look like some small changes, but they actually are very profound. With that, I hope that we can all embrace the change.
Motion agreed to; bill read a second time.
Ms MARTIN (Treasurer)(by leave): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bill read a third time.
GAMING CONTROL AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 82)
GAMING MACHINE AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 83)
(Serial 82)
GAMING MACHINE AMENDMENT BILL
(Serial 83)
Continued from 20 August 2002.
Mr BALDWIN (Daly): Madam Speaker, at the forefront, let me say we are not opposed to these bills going through. At the end of the day, this formalises the system that was in place; it puts it into legislation. There are some other changes within these bills that we do not oppose.
I do note, however, that payments into and out of the fund was no different in that they go through a committee, are recommended to the minister. I also note that the minister, he or she: ‘… shall approve a payment of the whole or part of a grant or refuse to approve a payment of the grant’, which was, once again, no different to the way it worked, the minister having final approval. Obviously, he must have regard to the committee’s recommendations. So this will formalise in legislation the Community Benefit Fund and needs these amendments to the Gaming Control Act and the Gaming Machine Act, and we are not opposed to them.
Mr STIRLING (Racing, Gaming and Licensing): Madam Speaker, I thank the member for Daly for his support of the bills. I want to point out that the normal program cycle would commence on 15 January 2003, with Funding Round One for 2003 in accordance with the schedule, published in the grant application guidelines as follows: Round One advertising would commence on 15 January; applications open 1 February, close 15 March; throughout April, May, applications assessed; completed by 15 June; and by 30 June, Round One approvals issued and the successful grants paid.
A similar process takes place in the latter part of the year, with Round Two advertising commencing on 1 July; 15 July applications open; 31 August close; September, October, assessment; 30 November assessment completed; and 15 December the Round Two approvals issued and the successful grants paid. So certainly, in the latter part of the year, those organisations successful under the Community Benefit Fund would appear to be receiving something of a Christmas present that close to the end of the year.
This first schedule, then, is a bit compressed because it does not fit the normal cycle. Throughout September commenced advertising; applications open; 30 October they will close; November, December for assessment; by 15 January assessment completed; and 31 January, approvals issued, with successful grants paid. That overlaps by about two weeks with the normal cycle starting for Round One in 2003 on 15 January.
I am sure the community organisations will welcome an opportunity to get funds for whatever their need is. We envisage trying to keep them down around that $5000 or under level, so that we can spread the $600 000 available throughout a full year as equitably as possible.
Madam Speaker, with those few remarks, I commend the bills to the House and I thank the opposition for their support.
Motion agreed to; bills read a second time
Mr STIRLING (Racing, Gaming and Licensing)(by leave): Madam Speaker, I move that the bills be now read a third time.
Motion agreed to; bills read a third time.
SPECIAL ADJOURNMENT
Mr STIRLING (Leader of Government Business): Madam Speaker, I am always paranoid about leaving this one out because I remember the former government almost missing it. I fact, I am not sure that they did not miss one time, and it might have been snuck in under the …
Madam SPEAKER: Would you just like to move the motion.
Mr STIRLING: I move that the Assembly at its rising adjourn until Tuesday, 8 October 2002, at 10 am or such other time and or date as may be set by Madam Speaker pursuant to sessional order.
Motion agreed to.
ADJOURNMENT
Ms MARTIN (Chief Minister): Madam Speaker, I move that the Assembly do now adjourn.
Motion agreed to; the Assembly adjourned.
Last updated: 04 Aug 2016