Page 4214 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 29 November 1994
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The committee could not be more blunt than that. If anybody has a criticism about this report, how much more specific could the committee have been? I repeat:
... the information provided was found to be insufficient to enable the Committee to fully examine each agency's performance ...
It is a pretty damning statement. Secondly, paragraph 2.4 states that in future:
... it will be essential that ... the committee have details of agency financial information on a sub-program basis.
That is a statement of a requirement for the future. Paragraph 2.6 states:
... the lack of more detailed financial data ... meant that the Committee was less successful in coming to firm conclusions about financial outcomes on a sub-program basis.
That means less successful than in previous years. After five years of building up a process by which the estimates of the Government have been thoroughly analysed, in the sixth year the committee discovered that it was unable to do that. We were pretty specific about the fact that the information was not there, and that the committee was unable to do what it was expected to do.
Given that we were unable to review the budgetary outcome, because the information was not there to allow us to do it, we have the result that the report becomes a report on the performance, not budget outcomes. We were forced, because we had little alternative, to review the operational performance rather than the budget performance. How successful were we in that? In fact, this was not facilitated either. One of the reasons that that was not facilitated was the continuing absence of quantifiable performance indicators. If you want to set out to judge an agency on how well it has done, presumably you take its own performance indicators and see how it performed against those performance indicators. In some cases, that simply was not possible, because the performance indicators themselves were not expressed in such terms that it was possible, at the end of the year, to make a judgment about it.
Let me go back to the transcript of the hearings, the minutes of which were presented with this report. I will draw on just two cases to illustrate that that was so. The first was in connection with the Director of Public Prosecutions. In the inquiry, I referred to the fact that many performance indicators were not capable of being objectively measured, and I referred in particular to one concerning the DPP. A performance criterion is:
The level of community respect for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions.
How on earth do you measure that? How do you measure what the level of respect is - not for what they do, even - for the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions? The answer is: It is incapable of being measured.
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