Moroney Sue: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11637. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):It is a pleasure for me to take a call on Part 2 of the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill. This is the part of course that amends the Public Finance Act and is therefore the part of the bill that I think does need a large amount of scrutiny. In amending the Public Finance Act this is the part where the way the Government’s Budget is structured is being altered. There are often very good reasons why the way in which Budgets are structured can be altered and I think that some of them are inherent in the changes that this bill brings about.But we do need to be cautious because changing the way Budgets are structured is often a way that Governments can actually create a bit of a smokescreen so that it is difficult to compare—John Hayes: As your Government did for 9 years.SUE MORONEY: —from year to year what is happening with the expenditure. So it is right and it is proper to give a lot of scrutiny and debate and discussion to this particular part of this bill. I know that Mr Hayes agrees with that because he obviously shares the concerns that I have raised.An example of that which I will give for anyone listening to this debate is in Vote ACC in the ACC area. Between 2008 and 2012 if we look at the way Budget documents are currently constructed we can see in the area of funding for injuryprevention in ACC that there has been something in the order of a 42 percent decline over those 4 years. [Interruption ] I know it is shocking. It is actually over a period of time in which workplace deaths have been increasing a time in which there has been real concern—The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order!SUE MORONEY: —around what has been happening in that area.I want to bring it back to the bill by using that as an example of why it is important that there is some consistency between the way the Budget is constructed from year to year. When it is constructed in a similar way we can actually track that through. We can see that the injury prevention funding has been cut by 42 percent over the course of 4 years. However when change in the way in which the Budget is constructed occurs as per the changes being proposed here in this part of the bill it does sometimes make it difficult to actually compare apples with apples—that is to say that the way the appropriation was brought down in 2008 for example is a direct comparison with the way in which it was constructed and brought down in 2012. So I guess the question that I would pose to the Minister would be to explain to the Committee how these changes will still be able to allow comparisons between years in terms of what is happening with those estimates so that we can be sure of how the money is being moved around.One of the changes that is being proposed in this part of the bill is a way in which the estimates can change so that it makes it clear that other departments as well as the one administering a particular appropriation can incur expenses against that appropriation. Again the example that I just used is I think really relevant to this part of the bill and this particular amendment because in the instance where there was a rapid decline in the appropriation for injury prevention spending from ACC there was a corresponding rise in spending on injury prevention in a different department under the Department of Labour or what has become known as “MoBIE”—the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. So this particular change would allow some transparency around the shifting of money which is how I read this particular amendment. It would therefore make it clear that even though there had been a huge decrease in funding of around 42 percent in injury prevention in one area and just I think about a 15 percent increase in the other area you would be able to put those together by using this amendment and see that overall there had still none the less been a substantial decrease across those two appropriations of funding in the injury prevention area. I think that this will create better transparency.