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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 2 Hansard (21 February) . . Page.. 487 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I believe it is important that the community have confidence in our committee system. On a couple of occasions I have found myself, as the chair of a committee and with the support of other committee members, having to make recommendations which we had already made in previous committees. It is quite disturbing when you realise that the same issues are coming up some years later. You realise that nothing has progressed. Of course, the disability field is one that we are all very conscious of at the moment and is a very classic example of this failure to achieve real progress. I will not get into that discussion now because I realise that this matter is listed on the notice paper.

It is my view that annual reports are a logical place for such feedback. Departments and other agencies are in the process of reporting anyway and this would be a matter of presentation and grouping some of the information in a way that makes it easier for people involved in a particular inquiry to follow.

When my office notified members of this motion, the example given was the committee inquiring into the March 2001 draft budget initiatives and capital works program for the Department of Education and Community Services. This committee recommended that government provide details of the implementation status of recommendations accepted by government relating to that committee's work. While the government agreed to this, it did not in the end respond.

I will go through the specifics of this motion. Paragraph (1) relates to the ongoing mechanism. It calls on the Chief Minister to include a reference to committee reports in the annual directions to departments to prepare annual reports. As members will be aware, annual reports are written each year according to directions from the Chief Minister as to content. Annual reports are routinely reviewed by Assembly committees and are available to anyone else who is interested, so this is a logical place for references to committee reports to be included.

The motion calls for the reporting to be restricted to recommendations that have been agreed to by the government of the day. That should allay concerns expressed to my office about one government being called on to carry the work of the former government, although I would say, on the record, that I would have hoped the committee work, being cross-party, would be of interest to governments whatever their flavour.

The terms agreed to may need to be interpreted broadly. Some responses-for example, last year's response to the Select Committee on the Role of Public Housing-stated clearly "Agreed", "Agreed in principle", "Agreed in part" or "Not agreed". I would hope that all these types of agreed categories would warrant inclusion in annual reports.

There were no clear statements of "agreed" or "not agreed" in respect of an earlier report of the Standing Committee on Social Policy, which I chaired, into the Commonwealth/Territory Disability Agreement. There was a more conversational response indicating what programs are in place or have been planned to deal with the issues raised in the recommendations. I would expect that this kind of response would be taken to indicate the government's acceptance of the recommendations. You would then expect that progress or cessation of the work mentioned in the response itself, in addition to further work, would be tracked through the annual reports in accordance with this motion.

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