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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 9 Hansard (20 August) . . Page.. 2419 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

quite different to sit at the table and watch the body language, rather than sitting in the gallery, watching the backs of people's heads.

It was a very positive process. The fact that this was a unanimous report, and the fact that it is the first time in five years that we have seen a unanimous report of the Estimates Committee, is testament to the time, effort and commitment of all the people who participated in that. I would like to thank the other members of the committee, the ministers for the time they put in-some more grudgingly than others-and their departmental officers. Particular thanks go to the staff of the committee office-Mr McCormack in particular-and to all the others who assisted him in the preparation of the report. We thought we worked hard. We sat there from 9.00 am until 6.00 pm, day in and day out, but when we went home, they continued to write. I pay testament to them. When we went home on Friday afternoons, they were still writing.

I would like to raise a few points, although some will be echoing what other members have said already. On performance indicators, I was, I confess, a little like a cracked record. After this, I will break the record for at least a short time but we must have better performance indicators. I observed the budget process in another way for the past five years. I have often said that we needed more and better performance indicators. Mr Humphries has also said that no previous government has been above criticism on this.

I think this is the time that we, as an Assembly, in concert with the government, must take on the advice of the Auditor-General. We need to have better, more accountable, more transparent and more readable, performance indicators. We need meaningful performance indicators which are put together in such a way that we do not have to go scurrying from ownership agreements to budget papers and performance outputs and then hope that you might find something meaningful in the annual report.

One of the early recommendations of the committee was that measures be meaningful, allow for comparison over time, be consistent with measures in the ownership agreements, and take into account the need for triple bottom-line reporting. This is probably the most important recommendation that has come out of this committee.

Whilst I am talking about openness, accountability and transparency, I cannot go past certain issues. Early in the piece, the members of the committee were presented with a list of savings. I was appalled at some of the things I found on this list, particularly a million dollars that had previously been devoted to social capital, which appeared as a saving.

Social capital is something which is dear to my heart. It is not dear to the heart of the Treasurer-he thinks it is nonsense. However, in the past few weeks, I have heard the Chief Minister wax eloquently on the subject of social capital on two or three occasions, and I was pleased to hear it. He has used words and phrases that I would be proud to use.

I was also pleased to see that, when we did bore down into this, the so-called saving on social capital was illusory, that it was a technical adjustment and that the money had not been saved at all, but had rightly been allocated to departments. There is a recommendation that, in future, in light of the need for more transparency, technical

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