Finance and Economic Opportunities
Whether the Province has reprioritised its budget and conditional grants to aid COVID-19 activities; if not, why not; if so, what are the relevant details?
As part of the fiscal response to COVID-19, the WCG has revised its budget process in that the 2020 budget process will consist of three phases.
Firstly, an immediate phase will focus on the COVID-19 pandemic through the reallocation of savings generated from expenditures foregone due to movement and other restrictions associated with the disaster and achieving greater levels of cost containment. The outcome of the immediate response phase will inform the First 2020 Adjusted Budget to be tabled by the end of July 2020.
The 2020 Budget Reprioritisation process or second phase will concentrate on the reprioritisation of policy and planning documents, as well as a second phase of response and will culminate in the Second 2020 Adjusted budget to be tabled in November 2020.
The third phase will culminate in the 2021Medium Term Expenditure Framework and will include a review of departmental and entity functions.
The draft document ‘Use of Conditional grants to respond to COVID-19’ dated 30 April 2020 - outlines the proposed approach to using conditional grants to support the disaster response. Broadly, the draft document states that:
- Provinces and municipalities should adjust their business plans to include more disaster-related activities that are already within the purpose and rules of the grant (no changes needed from NT, but useful for NT to give guidance to provinces and/or municipalities)
- Use section 20(6) of the DoRA to “reallocate” funds within a grant for disaster relief.
