Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I am not in a position to comment on the detail of what occurred, because the process of producing the budget papers is ultimately Treasury’s responsibility. Finance does have very substantial input into that process, but the fine detail of what goes on in that process is a question more for the Treasurer than for the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. As to the specific sequence and timing of errors being picked up, I am not in a position to provide details of that.

I would like to make an important contextual observation. The budget process was under unusual pressure in this instance. That was for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there was the sheer weight of the number of decisions in part as a result of the response to the global financial crisis and global recession. So there was a degree of additional pressure that would not normally be there from that. In particular, that tended to build in an element of delay in the decision-making process that perhaps would not have otherwise been there. So that added some pressure to the process of the production of budget papers. Secondly, there was the implementation of the Operation Sunlight reforms. That meant that, for the first time for some years, departments were asked to provide detailed estimates on a program basis, which is of course a very substantial and messy task. That added to an existing set of systems, which was quite a difficult challenge not just for my department but for individual line departments as well. That added somewhat to the total task. So I think that context is important to bear in mind. One of the reasons why we finished the process with several errors that had to be corrected was that the innate task was of a higher scale and pressure than perhaps it would normally be.

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