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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 917 ..
MS TUCKER (continuing):
one denies the right of the community to have a strong interest in them, their importance risks being discounted by their being considered out of context.
The passage headed "Key Result Areas" in the draft budget reads:
An integral part of the Government Plan is the development of Key Result Areas (KRAs). The Government has explicitly set out its targets and will report on their achievement.
The vision and the outcomes with their measures of success provide the long term focus for the ACT and guide the Government's activities each year. The KRAs set out below provide the more immediate objectives of the Government, and they describe the specific initiatives and strategies that the Government will achieve in this term.
That is what the Government says about key result areas at the beginning of its draft budget. Mr Hird says that we are out of line because we are speaking about social outcomes. I just think that that is extremely regrettable. I think that it will be of grave concern to the community that a member of this Government should say that. I sincerely hope that the Government will distance itself from that statement because it will look quite ridiculous if it does not, especially as we are continually getting from the Government the statement that it sees the need to integrate social concerns into policy formulation and we all agree that the budget is a major policy statement of the government of the day. (Extension of time granted)
As I have already explained, the committee made comments relating to expenditure issues. The first comment is about the GST. We have recommended that the ACT Government fully compensate community-based service providers for their GST liability. Comments later go into more detail about how we think that this should occur. It is entirely unsatisfactory that the Government is undecided about what to do about that.
The next recommendation of the committee is one that would mean more work for the Government. The committee has recommended that the Government conduct an analysis of the effect on quality educational outcomes in the ACT of the predicted teacher shortage. We do think that the Government should take an interest in that issue.
The fourth recommendation is about the SACS award. It is a recommendation that we have made before. We are asking the Government to do a full analysis of the impact of the SACS award on non-government service providers. It was also a recommendation of the committee in its report on annual reports. Mr Hird has dissented from that, saying that it is not compulsory and, therefore, is not an issue. The understanding of the community services is that there is a requirement on them to ensure that the salary component is, in fact, respected. There is certainly a willingness in the community sector to provide reasonable salaries for workers in this often very stressful work area. It
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