Page 1979 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 15 June 1994
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There is, however, a need to review and to revise the relationship between the Department of the Environment, Land and Planning and ACTTAB in order to ensure that there is an appropriate level of accountability to the Minister and by the Minister to the Assembly. Professor Pearce states:
The management of a government's interests through a statutory authority rather than a department can cause difficulties and many of the problems in this case have arisen because of those difficulties.
He goes on to say that ACTTAB, because of the nature of its function, which has traditionally been a private sector function, has operated with a high level of independence. It is an inescapable fact, however, that ACTTAB operates under an Act for which, in this Assembly, a Minister has administrative responsibility. For this reason, if for no other, it appears to me to be necessary for the department to have a liaison and monitoring role in relation to ACTTAB. This role needs to be stronger than it has been to date. In addition, the role needs to be fully accepted by both the department and ACTTAB, and appropriate administrative arrangements must be put in place to accommodate this role. Madam Speaker, the Minister for Sport has taken action to appoint to the ACTTAB board an officer of his department. This action should go some way to ensuring that there is a degree of liaison and monitoring of ACTTAB.
I consider that there is also a need for a higher level of monitoring of at least major decisions by ACTTAB and that the Government should be involved at an early stage in these decisions. This matter is dealt with in some detail in my following remarks. Madam Speaker, Professor Pearce has reached some conclusions which require further action by the Government, particularly conclusion No. (7), which says:
Guidelines need to be put in place to ensure that problems such as arose here do not reoccur because of uncertainty as to responsibility for various actions where a department and a statutory authority are involved in decision making. The respective tasks of the bodies concerned need to be spelled out.
We intend to take two courses of action in relation to this conclusion. The first relates to making it clear what matters should require attention by the Government. Both departments and authorities are required to report to their Minister or the Executive on a defined, and fairly limited, range of matters under the terms of various Acts. On most other matters where a Minister exercises executive decision making authority departments are accustomed to briefing the Minister on significant policy developments and advising on decisions required of the Minister.
The Pearce report points out that statutory authority status can carry with it varying degrees of independence from government control. The Government does not wish to impose some new layer of inflexible reporting rules to apply to every authority. Rather, Madam Speaker, we will strengthen the Cabinet handbook to make it clear that matters involving statutory authorities which are of similar importance to the VITAB contract come to Cabinet. This will be done in a manner consistent with the proper protection of commercial-in-confidence information provided to statutory authorities.
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