Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-16-Speech-2-132"
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"en.20031216.4.2-132"2
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"Mr President, in the light of what the last four speakers have said there does not seem much left to be said about the 2004 budget. Therefore, I will concentrate on one or two other things. Firstly, I join with others in thanking the Italian presidency for being cooperative in the way we came to a conclusion on this budget. It is nice to see Mr Ionta here with us today he has recently been in hospital and I hope he will send our best wishes for a speedy recovery to Mr Magri who has also been hospitalised. We wish him well and we are sorry he is not here today. But it is important to stress that the cooperation we have had from the Italians has helped in this process, as with previous budgets, whether it be under the Finns, French, Belgians or Danes although with the Finns it was rather nerve-racking when we all came into this Chamber with two different voting lists on the final day. But even then it was high drama!
It is also fair to say that, whilst a lot of thanks have been given to me, I want to reciprocate because this is probably the last budget debate I will be involved in as chairman. There will be the supplementary and amending budget next year, but this will be the last one I will be involved in as chairman for the general process. I have been told what a good job I have done, but you cannot do it unless you are working with the right people. Mr Mulder has already thanked the secretariat. He is right to do so, as we have an excellent secretariat in the Committee on Budgets, not least Alfredo de Feo, who leads that team extremely well. I have three good Vice-Chairmen who support me. I have a very good committee membership who take their subject seriously and show great interest. But the beauty of it is that it is a great team of coordinators, and especially Mr Walter, who makes my life so easy. I say that because I was a coordinator for five years, I have been a chairman for four-and-a-half years and I know which is the harder job it is not this one. It is wonderful being chairman, but the coordinators never get the thanks they deserve. All the coordinators in the Committee on Budgets have worked extremely hard. As you can see with the way that we will vote on Thursday for this budget, it will probably be the easiest budget that any of us have ever voted.
Having said that, I want to touch on a point Mrs Schreyer also mentioned, which is the future and what was proposed by Ecofin. Over the last 15 years in which I have been involved in the Committee on Budgets we in this Parliament have always shown how serious we are about the budget. We are not profligate; we are not wasteful; we do not do things because we just want to do them on a whim. As Mr Garriga Polledo said, there are political aspects to a lot of this budget and it is not just an accounting exercise. But if the Ecofin proposals had gone through – and they could still go through some time in the future – it will be an absolute disaster for Parliament and will lead to chaos. What we need between the two arms of the budgetary authority is a more realistic conciliatory approach from both arms. We have to start trusting each other. In the last four-and-a-half years we have tried to build that trust between our two institutions. But until we reach a position where we trust one another, there will always be suspicion from the Council, which wants to take away our powers, and we will always be suspicious of the Council and feel that if it does that we are going to get our own back in some way, shape or form. We could have lived with what the Convention proposed. We want to ensure that whatever comes in the future gives stability and realism to the system and also to show that we take our position
seriously.
It has been great being chairman of this Committee on Budgets. I still have two presidencies to go – the Irish presidency for six months; and then, for the trialogue and the conciliation in July, I will even be involved in the Dutch presidency. It is a wonderful position to have held. I am grateful to have held it and I just hope that in the future this Parliament has the dignity, powers and ability to serve the people of Europe in the way we have served it during these last five years."@en1
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