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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1191 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

of the fundamental priorities that the task force put in its report, particularly the implementation phase.

The first recommendation that the committee made was a very general recommendation. It was made in response to the concern that there is no obvious system or analysis to inform the government in its decisions in this area. Because of my membership of the Education, Community Services and Recreation Committee of this Assembly and of the Social Policy Committee of the last Assembly, I have a very strong sense of frustration on that. I know that we have done really valuable work through the committee system, informed by the work of the community and the various departments over the years. We have come up with recommendations which have been agreed to by the government of the day, yet we have not seen them implemented or picked up.

We have just had in the response of the government to the first phase of the draft budget process the statement that it does not understand the difference between need and want, that it is really hard and complicated, and so on. Through the committee's work we have taken steps towards understanding particular areas of need in the social policy area, so the first recommendation we have made is as follows:

The committee recommends that the Government provide the committee with details of the implementation status of all recommendations accepted by Government relating to education and community services made by the Standing Committee on Education, Community Services and Recreation and the Standing Committee on Social Policy of the Third Assembly.

We have made that recommendation because we would like to see this work used so it is not wasted. Mr Humphries talked today about wasting taxpayers' money. This recommendation is an attempt to address that very concern in terms of committee work, not only the energy but also the resources, by getting the government to acknowledge it and respond to it.

The second recommendation of the committee is that the government resource the development of a social plan. Such a recommendation has been made before, but we have put it again. It is about having a thoughtful approach to determining funding priorities. The third recommendation is that the government consider the views expressed in this inquiry through the submissions and the report about funding priorities. We are saying there that members of the community have gone to the trouble of providing submissions to this committee, doing so in a very short timeframe, and some of them are very confused and others quite annoyed by the fact that everything changed halfway through because suddenly we found a lot more money-an extra $1.6 million-that they could spend. Goodness me, if we did not come up with ideas on how to do it, someone else would spend it, which was a rather disturbing approach to determining the expenditure of public money.

On the capital works issues, we did make a specific recommendation about car parking arrangements at the Gold Creek school. We did that because it appeared to the committee from the evidence given that there was a rather difficult situation out there and we asked the government to urgently review the car parking arrangements.

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