Government Operations committee  Yes. On controlling the drawdown, we find that the controls that Mr. Suur and Mr. Greenslade have talked about are effective at the aggregate level. We have the appropriations that lapse, and we have this requirement that you need to apply to run an operating loss. We have a daily sweeping of cash to make sure that cash isn't just sitting there for people to use.

Government Operations committee  Yes, subject to the approval of the Minister for Finance.

Government Operations committee  Our Auditor General does review and audit our consolidated financial statements each year. That's a whole-of-government document. That covers not just the budget-funded parts of government, it covers all the non-budget parts of government as well. That's a fully audited document.

Government Operations committee  The Senate formally has a power to reject some of our annual appropriation bills. That's obviously an extreme situation. It only happened once, in 1975, when it caused a constitutional crisis. But that power exists. It also has the ability to modify some others. On the whole, the primary role of the Senate is a scrutiny role.

Government Operations committee  The task of making Parliament happy is always evolving.

Government Operations committee  The reforms are trying to build on the PGPA. The PGPA says it's important to focus on performance and it's important to focus on risk and all of these sorts of things. What we're doing is taking each of the key elements and building those out. We started by building out the performance side of it.

Government Operations committee  The origin of this wave in many ways is bipartisan. It started under a government back in 2010. It was passed through Parliament after a change of government. We've had several years of parliamentary committees looking at all of those things. It's really a combination of recognizing the dissatisfactions that Parliament has, the complexities that we see from inside the system, and the weaknesses that the audits and other types of scrutiny have revealed.

Government Operations committee  Very briefly, the information is too dense. I don't think the information is presented in a way that is simple enough. That's one of our challenges. We have a lot of stuff there that is cut so many different ways. People still struggle, and Parliament tells us they struggle, with finding what they're after.

Government Operations committee  I'll make some brief comments on that, and then maybe Mr. Suur can handle the first part of the question, briefly as well. Under annual appropriations, we run appropriations for ordinary annual services, which basically means anything that's pre-existing, that is a normal part of keeping things ticking over, such as salaries and these sorts of things, and then we run another type of annual appropriation that covers new outcomes or other kinds of one-offs and these sorts of things.

Government Operations committee  I would say no, particularly once the depreciation was taken out of the appropriations. In essence, we don't see large volumes or large numbers in accumulated funds sitting around the place. I should also flag that we manage cash centrally on a daily basis. Mr. Greenslade's area sweeps cash out of all the bank accounts every day and allocates cash the next day according to projected needs.

Government Operations committee  Yes. Typically, the life cycle is as follows: ministerial submission, green brief, and measure, as we call it, which is a decision. It gets published in the budget papers and is reflected in other documents, such as the portfolio budget statements, as we call them, and in corporate plans, etc.

Government Operations committee  In addition to the budget speech, we have four main budget papers, which are papers issued by the treasurer and the finance minister. They go through the strategy and the economic position, and they present the financial information and a whole range of things. For example, there are things that go to relationships between the Commonwealth and the states.

Government Operations committee  The process is always at the discretion of the government of the day, so it could choose to design the process quite differently. In fact—

Government Operations committee  That's a very good question. Thank you. To give some sense of it, in each budget there are the four budget papers, which, if it makes any sense, would look very wide in terms of stacking them side to side, so maybe 1,000 pages across the budget papers, plus maybe 5,000 pages of portfolio budget statements.

Government Operations committee  No. This is one aspect of the budget process where governments change and processes change. Some people would run a process exactly as you describe, but at other times in our history, there would be different kinds of arrangements in place. None of those processes would be public processes.