Mike Elliott: Budget Honesty

Extract from Hansard

Legislative Council
30 October 2001

Mike Elliott
Leader Australian Democrats
Member of the Legislative Council

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The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Treasurer a question about budget honesty during state elections.

The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: It is a common excuse put forward by incoming governments that the previous government cooked the books. It occurred after the recent losses of the Western Australian and Northern Territory Liberal governments, as well as after the 1994 South Australian election. At that time the Treasurer accused the outgoing Labor government of misleading the people and public of South Australia about the true financial situation of the state. On 3 May 1994 Hansard reported that the Hon. Stephen Baker said:

It places great pressure on all governments when overnight we find we have an asset base of $10 billion less than that which was previously provided by the former Treasurer in a budget situation where we expect some degree of accuracy.

It is an issue that has been picked up by the federal government in its charter of budget honesty. As part of the federal election campaign, the Howard government released an updated report on the federal economy, only recently released. This report showed a much smaller surplus than expected and many experts believe it is behind the modest election promises made by Labor and the Liberals.

Over previous months I called on the former Olsen government, and I now call on the Kerin government, to match its federal counterparts and make a similar commitment to budget honesty. To this time the only response from the Treasurer to the media has been through a spokesperson who avoided the issue by claiming that all Liberal promises had been fully funded. My questions are:

1. Will the Treasurer make a commitment to budget honesty along the lines of those made by the federal government and release an update on the state's economic situation, approved by the Auditor-General as accurate, within two weeks of a state election being called and, if not, why not?

2. Does the Treasurer agree that it is hypocritical to criticise opposition parties for not detailing the funding for their election promises while he refuses to instruct Treasury to release the very figures on which such promises could be based, and in all this recognising that the election may well be 10 months after the previous budget?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer): What I have said publicly and, I thought, in this chamber on previous occasions is that the government is releasing in January or February next year the half yearly update of the budget position. It has to be gazetted and publicly released, and it is available for everyone to see.

At the time, I said to the Hon. Mr Holloway-it is now coming back to me-that we do not have to table it in the Council, although we are happy to, because it is actually published in the Gazette and available for everyone to see. It is done every year in about February. Given that the election is intended to be in March, I would have thought that this suggestion from the Hon. Mr Elliott-that it will be some 10 months since the budget and therefore we need to update the figures-is hard to justify.

I am happy to check whether or not I have said this on the record in this chamber and, indeed, where else I have answered the question. Nevertheless, the answer remains the same. Every year we do an update, and it is available in January or February each year. It has to be gazetted. It is made available publicly and it shows the major changes in the budget between May and the six or seven month period after that before January or February. Probably the books are ruled off in about the end of November or December and then published in January or February.

I am very happy to reinforce the fact that an update of information will be made available, entirely consistent with the practice that we have established for quite some time and, therefore, there should not be a complaint from the Democrats or the Labor Party or anyone that they have not had updated information upon which they could do their costings if they wanted to.

The Hon. L.H. Davis: And they should release their costings. That would be more interesting.

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: As we have been challenging for some time, it will be interesting to see from the whingeing, whining opposition that we have in South Australia not only its promises but, more importantly, the costing of those policy commitments. The third point that I make is that the Hon. Mr Elliott referred to problems in Western Australia after the election. If he did- and again I will check the Hansard record-in Western Australia the government actually released one of these charters of budget honesty, or something similar, during the election period.

The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: As a supplementary question, should an election be called prior to the mid-year budget being released, is the Treasurer prepared to make such a statement available, as has happened federally?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS: I can assure the honourable member that there is no intention from the government to call an election prior to the end of the year. Should those circumstances arise, from the government's viewpoint we would be happy to update the budget information to the extent that we can. But that would probably be only a three month update.

It is pretty hard, in the first three months of a financial year, to place too much store on the progress of a 12-month budget at that stage; six months is probably about the minimum time to get any reasonable indication of the trends in terms of commitments and expenditure. But, certainly, from the government's viewpoint, we would put together what information we might be able to in terms of what government commitments have occurred in the first three months or so of the year, what additional information we might know about additional revenue items and some sort of early estimate.

It would have to be fairly rudimentary and, certainly, not to the same degree of specificity which we do, as a matter of course, at the six-month period and which we have regularly gazetted.