A Charter of Budget Honesty

Canberrans are sick of the spin that this government inserts in all of its budgets. Today, I can announce that we will introduce legislation to establish a charter of budget responsibility for the ACT. A charter of budget responsibility will strengthen transparency, accountability and fiscal discipline in the territory. It will help to ensure that governments cannot hide the true state of the budget, they cannot bury the long-term cost of decisions or ask Canberrans to pay more without actually showing them why.

Our charter will mandate budget honesty, fiscal discipline, intergenerational equity, year-to-year comparability, program-level transparency and appropriation integrity in law. It will require clear fiscal rules. It will require honest reporting of debt and interest costs. It will require the government to disclose unfunded commitments, temporary funding cliffs, whole-of-life infrastructure costs and fiscal risks.

It will require the budget to show when services are being funded with temporary money. It will require the budget to be comparable from one year to the next. It will require public money to be traceable between the program, project or budget measure that the Assembly approved. We will also pursue targeted amendments to the Financial Management Act to strengthen appropriation integrity. This is about restoring trust.