Page 4215 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 29 November 1994
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The second case, without going through many - and there were many - related to community nursing. An example of a performance criterion used by the Community Nursing Service is its ability to:
operate within prescribed budget allocation while maintaining projected activity levels.
In other words, if at the end of the year you do not spend any more money than you were allocated, you have done well. That is not a measurable performance indicator in anybody's language. In fact, 20 years ago, that is what all Commonwealth agencies used to operate to. You gave them some money and they spent it; and, at the end of the year, they said, "We spent every cent; therefore, we achieved the Government's objective". Of course, it does not follow that they achieved the Government's objective. They spent the money, but what did they get for it? Here we are in 1994, and an organisation states that to be one of its performance indicators. Even Mr Connolly agreed with me that this was hardly satisfactory. I quote those as two examples only.
We were unable to do the job in terms of budgetary performance. In many cases, we were unable to do it in terms of performance indicators either. Again, we made our position quite clear. In paragraph 2.9 we noted:
The ... Estimates Committee expressed concern that in many cases agencies did not have objective measures of performance. That committee noted that the Auditor-General was to undertake a review ...
At paragraph 2.12 this committee said:
... the Committee notes that many agencies work in the context of performance indicators which are virtually incapable of measurement in any objective way, and should not be accepted as performance indicators.
How more damning could a review committee be? In other words, "Your performance indicators are not worth the paper that they are written on". Again, people who say that this is a bland report and that it does not say anything have not read the words. We were very explicit about what we meant, and we criticised the performance in the only terms that were available to us.
The next question was based on the performance indicators and other matters, including the inability of the committee to determine whether specific objectives identified at the beginning of the year had, in fact, been met. I raised a number of questions with agency heads and with Ministers, such as that in the budget papers a year ago they said, "We are going to do this. We are going to put this program into place" or "We have this specific program objective we are going to achieve". They thought that it was so important that they made specific mention of it in their budget papers. Fifteen months downstream we were reviewing their performance. The annual reports of the agencies, in many cases, made no reference at all to those matters. Even in questioning,
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