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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 580 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

committee to see these contracts as open and available. So it really does seem quite chaotic in terms of how the Government's principles have been applied or communicated through the different agencies and their practices. It is really very concerning to me that this is the case.

We are seeing problems with system failure in a number of investigations of this Government's work. Obviously it was a major concern in the coronial inquest on the implosion. It was also something that came out of the investigation of the Belconnen tip management; that there was system failure. They are all slightly different issues, but the point is that we seem to have seen a breakdown in coordination and an increase in adhocery in how government is working. That has to be a concern.

If we are to have accountability in government we have to see that the government of the day actually knows how to ensure that its policies, its publicly stated policies, are implemented by the people who work with those policies. That is just a basic management issue, and this Government claims to be pretty good at management. When I look at the policy advice sections of the annual reports and budgets, it is interesting to me how they always get 100 per cent for policy advice, but we continually see these sorts of breakdowns in systems. I find the whole thing a bit interesting.

The issue of the legislation that has now come up from, I understand, three members regarding commercial-in-confidence obviously does need to be looked at. I wonder if it would be necessary if you actually did have a government that was truly committed to ensuring that its policies were translated into programs and were implemented in a way that was consistent. That is a question of management and commitment from the government of the day to ensure that its policies are implemented, and that does not seem to have been the case. A less charitable view would be that occasionally commercial-in-confidence might be used to try to conceal particular issues, and that could be an explanation for the adhocery. It is certainly one that has been put publicly. So that also is extremely concerning to the community if it is the case.

I think this is a very important issue that we are dealing with because, as members are well aware and have already mentioned, we do have so much more outsourcing of what used to be government services. We do have a situation where the private sector is more and more engaging in contracts with government. This is expenditure of public money.

There is an onus on both parties to understand that public money has to be spent in an open, accountable and transparent way, and that is what this discussion is about. It is about ensuring that the private sector and the Government understand that there is a different responsibility. This Government does speak about doing government in a businesslike way, but you cannot take that to the degree that you would not expect that the fact that this is expenditure of public money would influence how you do business. It absolutely has to. That is why we are having this debate, and that is why so many people in the community are very concerned when we see further outsourcing, for example, right now, of the utility of ACTEW.

Moving further away from government control, issues of access to information are fundamental, and that came out of the investigation into the Sydney Water issue. It comes up over and over again when you are looking at accountability of operations of private

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