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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 1 Hansard (15 February) . . Page.. 10 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

We made a number of recommendations covering various areas that came to our attention through the inquiry. We received submissions from a number of community organisations as well as briefings from the Government. The first recommendation we made related to the amount of information given in annual reports regarding membership of ministerial advisory councils and other consultative bodies. We asked that we have more detail of these in the annual reports, because it is of interest to the community to see who is advising and who is on particular bodies that have quite some influence on occasions.

We were also interested in analysis of quality effectiveness measures in the annual report. We made a comment about the Child Health and Development Service not having an assessment of the satisfaction with its services carried out by educational staff - teachers and so on. CHADS provides a service to teachers in that it has some responsibilities in enabling teachers to deal with children in their classes who have a disability.

We also made some comments about the financial information. We thought it would be useful to have a little bit more detailed financial information for each government school output class. It was the view of the committee that it would be interesting to know which areas of government school education are contributing more significantly than others to the operating deficit. We were also interested in seeing more detail on the breakdown of revenue collected within each output class.

We also discussed service purchasing arrangements and recommended that future annual reports include more detail on service purchasing arrangements. That is because the committee was of the view that the report would be enhanced and the community would gain a better understanding of the nature of services purchased if more detail was included on the funding arrangements, details such as the name of the area purchasing the service, the name of the service provider, the nature of the service provided, funds provided to provide the service and time period covered by the funding. Obviously this is of interest to members of the Assembly and the community, because we see so much service delivery now carried out by the community sector, or by the for-profit sector in some instances.

We also made a comment about community service obligations. We noted that DECS received $7.3m cash from government for community service obligations and that that was a decrease from $9.7m provided in 1998, but we could not see details in the annual report about the purpose of the CSO funding, the amount of funding provided, the name of the agency to which the funding was going and so on. It would be useful to see more detail on that, because the community service obligation is important to many of us.

We also took an interest in regulatory matters. We made a recommendation asking that the Government require all departments and agencies, where possible, report on regulatory matters. ACTCOSS provided a table that shows the legislation the department administers and whether the department has reported against the standards contained in the legislation, provision of licensing, reporting on licensing and reporting on complaints. We provided a copy of that table in the report. We considered that fuller reporting on regulatory matters would enhance the department's annual report.

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