Finance's Budget Group and the Business Services Group, in respect to shareholder advisory functions, are responsible for contributing to Outcome 1—sustainable Government finances. This is achieved by delivering the following outputs:

• supporting the preparation and delivery of the Commonwealth Budget;
  
  
• providing whole-of-government budgetary, financial and policy advice on outcomes and outputs;
  
  
• provision of advice to Government in its capacity as owner of organisations including advice on balance sheet management;
  
  
• whole-of-government financial reports such as the consolidated financial statements for the Commonwealth, and monthly financial reports.

PERFORMANCE SNAPSHOT

Finance successfully contributed to Outcome 1 in 2000–01 by assisting the Government in meeting its medium-term fiscal objective to achieve underlying Budget balance on average over the economic cycle.

A key indicator of how Finance's outputs contributed to the successful delivery of Outcome 1 is the extent to which the advice and information provided by the Department was timely and of high quality. To help measure this accurately, Finance encourages Ministers and their staff to give feedback on the quality, timeliness and rigour of its Departmental Ministerial briefs and advice. This feedback is analysed against our performance targets to provide an overall indication of performance for the year.

While Finance did not achieve all of the performance targets it set for itself, the overall result was very good and, in many instances, targets were exceeded. Finance was able to achieve a perfect or near perfect result in a number of performance indicators. We were also able to meet an increased demand for services in several outputs.

More detailed performance information, including analysis and resources tables for Outcome 1 can be found at the end of this chapter.