It’s that time again. The eternal budget cycle is reaching the end of last year’s budget and about to launch into releasing a brand new one.
But before any new numbers get released (typically in May), Parliament spends quite a few months investigating what happened to all the money they gave out last time.
I suspect if children had to account for the use of their pocket money quite so rigorously, they wouldn’t ask for any.
Parliament's financial cycle Photo: parliament
The Annual Review begins with select committees asking many thousands of written questions to the many ministries, departments and entities that comprise the practical end of government.
They then hold public grillings of senior public service staff and their ministers to tease out the details of any loose ends, and of course look for political opportunities.
Parliament collects the dozens of reports from the select committee’ investigations and publishes them for MPs to consider and debate. We have now reached that stage.
This week Parliament will move through the first two readings of the Appropriation (2019/20 Confirmation and Validation) Bill. These two readings are a formality and aren't debated. The energy is all saved up for the nitty-gritty stage later.
The Bill is really just a rundown of spending changes since the budget. It pales in comparison to the Annual Review reports that come with it.
The debate comes at the committee stage and takes 10 hours, across a few days. The debate is based on the Annual Review reports and is broken into the various topic areas of the budget (the votes).
This year is also the first time the debate will happen fully under the new committee stage debate rules, where it is more about an active interchange between responsible ministers and the MPs (and less about long speeches).
Last year this new form of committee stage was being trialed, but when the House got to the Annual Review debate, the House was operating under restricted Covid-19 numbers. So it never quite got to fully spread its wings.
One of the oddities about this long debate is that, as it goes on, the ‘responsible minister’, answering MPs’ questions from the Table keeps on changing, as the specific areas under consideration also change. It’s a ministerial smorgasbord.
