Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to ask our guests a couple of questions.
You mentioned that something new is performance statements as part of budgeting and reporting. Our system has that in terms of reporting on plans and priorities, and then the departmental performance reports. I think they were considered by a previous parliamentary study to be a lot of information that doesn't have a lot of high value, so I'm interested in your approach to following through to make information more usable for Parliament. What are your ways of connecting the dollars to the programs and the priorities of the ministries? Could you talk a bit about that?
Second, I want to ask about the appropriations vote structure. I guess in our system it's called “input-based”. The input is dollars for capital, which is a vote. If the input is dollars for operations, that's a vote for a ministry. There is also advice from that previous parliamentary committee to consider changing the vote structure to give parliamentarians more control over program activities, so the vote approvals, appropriations, may be by program or purpose as opposed to the broader categories of the input of the funds. I'd like to know what the Australian mechanism is for the actual votes for appropriations.