I'm sorry. I'm on the “Overview of the Federal Government's Expenditure Management System”, chapters 1 and 2, and I'm on page 38.
When you're comparing the expenditures on main estimates versus supplementary during either the budget surplus period or a budget deficit period, that gets away from the technical ability due to lack of IT technology, etc., but it gets back to the human decision. That's where I've noticed the supplementary estimates went from 4.5% at the time of deficit up to 10%.
This gets me back to this particular government's decision. Not wanting to play the political card, but for many years the previous government ran significantly large surpluses. The common complaint was that these became discretionary, so there wasn't enough attention paid to expenditure control; whereas if we are able to bring the surpluses down to a much more modest level, then potentially we would not have that discretionary spending available, whether it's last minute for electoral or for whatever particular gain. Then we can get back to departmental spending, which would be much more stringently controlled and ideally confined to the requirements of that department.
Is that a fair statement of the direction the government should be going in?