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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 10 Hansard (12 October) . . Page.. 2968 ..

MS CARNELL (continuing):

Those opposite obviously do not care about these issues, but these are the very issues that affect our quality of life and the quality of the city we live in, and they should be things that we as an Assembly are vitally interested in. Until now, of course, we have had no consolidated approach to how we measure these things and how we can improve on how we are performing in these areas. Until now these kinds of measures have failed to rate very highly with commentators and politicians and certainly have failed to rate very highly in debates in this place, which is exactly the reason why this Government has decided to take the bold step - and it is a bold step - of preparing an annual state of the Territory report.

It is worth pointing out that this Government has already taken the lead in developing other social projects such as the quality of life project, which is being conducted in partnership with ACTCOSS, and the poverty inquiry as well. This inquiry is expected to be completed next year and will report to this place. We would not have had to take all these steps if those opposite, in their time in government, had bothered. For all of their talk about caring, about poverty or about quality of life, none of these things were ever done. No poverty inquiry, no quality of life, no state of the Territory report. So much for the rhetoric of those opposite on caring about what this city is like to live in.

You have to laugh when you hear members of the Labor Party talking about social policy. Quite obviously, they do not have any such policies. If they did, they would not be knocking an approach that is an Australian first. State of the territory reports are not unique in a world context. Other governments around the world have already initiated annual reports of this nature, but this is a first for Australia and definitely a first for the ACT.

Mr Quinlan: Very cynical.

MS CARNELL: Mr Quinlan says this is cynical. Not at all. In fact, this is a very definite effort to have a real social policy and social direction for this Assembly. Obviously, those opposite could not care less about that, and that is in line with the approach they took in government. A steering committee which includes a representative from the community sector has already been established within the Public Service to drive the state of the Territory report, which we expect to be completed at the end of this year or early next year. The report is likely to include more than 80 indicators across health, education, the environment, housing, transport, the economy and other key areas.

While we do not expect to have it perfect in our first year of release, it will, however, enable us to set a baseline and measure any changes in the years to come. As I said earlier, it will be a genuine attempt to measure our quality of life so that we can better identify where we are heading and what steps we need to put in place to improve that quality of life for our city in the future.

There is another reason why this Government chose to go down this path. Earlier this year the Estimates Committee produced a report that claimed that there was somehow a growing social deficit in Canberra. The sad but revealing fact is that the committee failed to produce one piece of hard evidence to back up that statement. This was despite the fact that we were able to produce hard evidence that in three key social indicators -

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