Page 2180 - Week 08 - Thursday, 10 September 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
In the summary of major achievements, we should draw attention to the recognition received by the department and its officers last year. They won a planning award at the 1992 Royal Australian Planning Institute congress; and two gold medals in the government technology productivity awards scheme for their computerised irrigation system, which I am told will yield 20 per cent savings in water, and for the distributed geographic information system, which will have a major impact on environmental management. The department and its officers should be complimented on those achievements.
I also commend the department for the professionalism with which their planning documents are produced - there is a nice map here that is part of that - and the access this gives to the community for consultation. The response to the draft Territory Plan indicates the degree to which this department is moving towards community consultation and community involvement. I note the creation of the ACT Office of Sport and Recreation, resulting from the Hartung report; but I do question the necessity for the following report, which has just been completed, and how it relates to the Hartung report and its recommendations. I guess that we will just have to wait till next year to get the answers to that.
In general, a look at the provision of general and specific objectives for 1992-93 is useful; but, in respect of the measures for program evaluation, the indices leave a great deal to be desired. We have talked in other forums about program evaluations, performance indicators and the like. In both the ACT and the Commonwealth, over a number of years performance indicators have been questioned, but not a great deal of progress seems to have been made in remedying their deficiencies. They are still stated in very general, broad terms and often in terms that cannot be quantified.
I suppose that the deficiencies can be summarised by saying that they are too general, they are too subjective, they fail to provide measurable assessments, and they are not comparable from one year to the next. That is perhaps an outcome of our inability to quantify them. I recognise the difficulty in measuring much of public sector activity. I have been involved in attempts to do it over many years, over decades. But I would have thought that in a department that deals in real services it would have been easy to make some progress towards objectivity, quantification, comparability and linking performance to objectives and to departmental activities.
I note in the access and equity appendix that the department has a program at Calthorpes' House museum to assist the visually impaired, which I think is an important initiative and one we can commend. I do wonder whether such assistance could be provided at other museums and with reference to other program activities for both the visually impaired and those suffering from other impairments. Measures to assist the ageing and the disabled are to be commended.
Appendix D deals with consultants employed by the department, and among the consultancies, many of which are interesting, there are some that I think need to be looked at because they make me a little curious. The first is the review of the ACT Office of Sport and Recreation carried out by Deloitte, Ross and Tohmatsu at a cost of $29,600. I have already referred to my concern that it may have simply duplicated much of what was in the Hartung report, and I wonder whether this one was needed at all.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .