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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (22 August) . . Page.. 3134 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

It also said:

It is necessary for governments to explicitly analyse and take account of the range of viewpoints before defining their outputs and intended impacts on the quality of life of individuals and communities.

That is about actually broadly examining the issues before you decide what your outputs or outcomes are going to be. It also says:

Qualitative information is very important to an understanding of the performance of an agency. In many cases, evidence about a particular aspect of output performance derived from qualitative measures will be more relevant to particular decisions than that provided by quantitative data. It is, therefore, essential for managers to have access to qualitative measures, either to report on difficult-to-quantify aspects of performance or to provide needed explanatory information. Quantitative measures should rarely, if ever, be used on their own.

Another comment from the Australian National Audit Office and Commonwealth Department of Finance includes a useful checklist. The document Performance information principles: better practice guide, 1996, includes this particular point: "The collection of information should not be confined to those items which are 'easy to measure'."

The community participation in planning for and assessing quality outcomes section of the More than the sum of its parts document refers particularly to access and equity issues, and I refer to this in this debate because of the user-pays component of this proposal:

Access and equity issues

The next tool deals with fairness and opportunity on which ACT government already has a statement. For information on auditing and evaluating performance in relation to equity and access, please refer to the Australian National Audit Office and Commonwealth Department of Finance's Performance Information Principles: Better Practice Guide. The guide provides a checklist which covers the following issues:

Access

Equity

Communication

Responsiveness

Effectiveness

Efficiency

Accountability.

Community and citizen participation issues

The following checklist is taken from a paper by Wray and Hauer, entitled, Performance measurement to achieve quality of life: adding value through citizens.

The Do's for involving citizens in performance measurement:

Design a performance measurement and quality-of-life effort that explicitly involve citizens as partners.

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