Page 3995 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 23 November 1993
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seek and they are able to respond quite rapidly. That means that the information processes within the organisation are becoming better. I can remember the first Estimates Committee hearings of this Assembly, when a lot of the information that we asked for simply was not available. There were no databases from which it could be extracted. It is only fair to note that the performance of officers of the ACT Government Service is improving every year. I have no complaint whatsoever about the way they respond to the very heavy demands that are placed on them by this committee.
I think that the Estimates Committee process is becoming more effective. I am quite sure that Ministers sitting before the Estimates Committee must become quite exasperated with the sort of questioning to which they are subjected, the detail that members of the Assembly are now beginning to ask them to provide, and the accountability to which they are now being subjected. I can understand that they may get a little exasperated with that; but, for those ordinary members of this Assembly, this is the only time of the year and the only mechanism available to find out what is actually behind the budget and what the Government really intends to do. The budget documents, no matter how comprehensive they are, cannot tell the whole story, even if the Government wished to tell the whole story - and, of course, obviously there are times when they do not. It is a process by which ordinary members of the Assembly can inform themselves as to what the Government's intentions really are, what they intend to do with this very large sum of money that we are asked to appropriate for the purposes that the Ministers specify. It is a rigorous process. It is becoming more rigorous year by year. We are asking for more and more information.
There are essentially three things that the Estimates Committee is beginning to focus on. First of all, they are looking for the provision of comprehensive, cohesive information about the Government's programs. That is increasingly being provided in information contained in annual reports and very comprehensive supplementary information way beyond what would normally be provided in budget papers. Secondly, we are looking for reconciliations from one year to the next, so that we can see that what we appropriated last year was, in fact, spent for the purposes for which we appropriated it and how that translates into new programs or continuation of programs for the coming year. Did the Government achieve its objectives that it set for itself last year? If not, why not? If so, how well? What does the Government now intend to do to implement new programs or to carry on the old ones in some cases. Of course, in many cases, programs go on for years.
The third thing that the committee has been looking for and is still looking for, perhaps with less success than in the other areas, is to identify the performance criteria that agencies have set for themselves. I must say that this year I was quite disappointed. I had thought over the previous years that the specification of performance criteria was improving and that we were getting an improved ability to judge an agency against its performance criteria. This year, it seems to me, that somehow it has failed. It was not easy to find out, first of all, what the performance criteria were. It seemed that they were being expressed in very general terms. I believe that a performance criterion has to be something that is measurable. If you cannot measure it, how do you know whether you are meeting it or not? A performance criterion has to be something that you can measure so that you can make a judgment after the event about the degree to
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