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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4975 ..

MS REILLY: Maybe we could come to an arrangement. We could job-share. I just want to congratulate Mrs Carnell on bringing forward this document at this time. Here we are, sitting for the last day - the last gasp - of this Assembly, and we have a consultation protocol produced now. I can remember, before the 1995 election, a lot of discussion, a lot of community dissent and a lot of words said by those opposite when they were in opposition about community consultation and consultation protocols. But it has taken them three years to get this together. I think it is interesting that this happens at the last gasp before the Government finishes.

Mr Stefaniak: We have done a hell of a lot of consulting in the meantime.

MS REILLY: The other boast all the way through, as Mr Stefaniak has just carefully reminded us all, has been about how much consultation has happened. We keep hearing these amazing figures. We keep seeing the appropriately paid for advertisements in the paper to "Meet the Minister", showing that the Ministers are out there running community consultations. But, at times, it does not seem to deliver anything. This is what my concern is, that it does not appear to deliver anything.

Just by accident, I opened up at a list in the Register of Community Consultation. On page 13 it refers to No. 30, Bureau of Sport, Recreation and Racing, ACT Academy of Sport, 1997 individual scholarship program. The target group is prospective elite athletes. It talks about applications being called for and people being selected. That is not consultation; it is a selection process. So, is this really consultation, or is it just a huge list to show that you are being active? That is what a lot of the consultation appears to be - a lot of activity. Of course, a lot of people will tell you that there is a lot of activity going on, and quite often one agency does not know what another agency is doing. So, you can be consulted on a number of issues but get no resolution and have different agencies turning up on different days to consult.

We had a discussion earlier today - there was a question and a response - about the community care issues around the setting up of the COOOL houses at Macquarie and Fisher. There has been lots of consultation on that; but the issues that have been raised by the residents have not been resolved in any way at all. So, it is difficult to see consultation as an answer to anything. This is what concerns me.

Another issue concerning people that has been in the papers for a number of weeks is the Downer Oval. This is another example of consultation gone very badly wrong. We do not have a situation where the Ministers are ensuring that people know what is going on. Let us look at the criteria for good consultation. In the document there is a heading "What is consultation?". Then it talks about when the consultation should take place. It says:

Appropriate consultation needs to commence early in any decision making process.

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