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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 5 Hansard (11 May) . . Page.. 1479 ..

The Committee asked about details of direct revenue resulting to Canberra from the Olympics and I am happy to inform the Assembly that a report is being developed and will be released shortly.

There were three recommendations that the Government has not agreed with.

The Government does not agree to Recommendation 4, which proposes the development of a whole of government system to quantify the impact on human capital when determining whether a service should be delivered in-house or from an external provider.

While the Government understands the importance of maintaining corporate knowledge, it does not consider it appropriate to attempt to quantify the impact of contracting out corporate knowledge. The impact of contracting out services upon corporate knowledge cannot be reliably measured. The Government considers the current process, whereby individual agencies take this and other factors into consideration, to be adequate. Can I emphasise that the Government focuses on achieving high standards of service.

The Government does not agree to Recommendation 5, as it believes that the Annual Report adequately reports on key areas of activity.

This recommendation was to include key areas of activity occurring during a financial year, which did not accrue a recordable expense at the balance date. The Government adheres to Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in the preparation of its annual financial statements. This includes recognising all accrued expenses for activities undertaken during a financial year. The annual reports also provide qualitative information on all key areas of activity undertaken during the previous financial year, including information on significant ongoing projects.

Finally, the Government does not agree to Recommendation 10, which requested that ACTEW reconcile the highlights and objectives listed in the budget papers against actual performance for the year.

Annual Reports are clearly designed to report on an agency's performance over the financial year. In practice, the ACTEW Corporation's Annual Report has given more information than is required for reporting against the key highlights listed in the Budget Papers. I note that the complex nature of the report does make it difficult to clearly link a key highlight from the budget papers to a specific performance measure reported in the annual report. However, this does not deny the fact that key strategic highlights are covered in the ACTEW Annual Report.

In summary, I believe the Government has listened to the Committee, and, in its Annual Report Directions has required that Departments go further in disclosure than they have ever done so before.

Mr Speaker, I thank the Standing Committee for it's Report and I commend the Government Response to the Assembly.

Debate (on motion by Mr Berry ) adjourned.

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