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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 10 Hansard (29 August) . . Page.. 3022 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

In terms of outcomes, I mention again my concern about the performance indicators. I think the Liberal Party should accept responsibility for the mess of meaninglessly quantified outputs that constitute most of the performance indicators in this budget. The obsession with arbitrary figures, designed to mimic some irrelevant business model, has unfortunately left a scar on how the ACT government describes its business.

I do not think it is a surprise that we are still waiting to see change, as neither people nor processes change very quickly, but I do look forward to the establishment of new, safer and more effective procedures that can be both identified and described in next year's budget. I trust also that these changes will be shaped by government and service providers in collaboration with consumers, their families and friends.

It is important in this process, as in many others that the ACT government is engaged in, to value the contribution of small and very small not-for-profit, non-government organisations. I refer members to "The Emerging Voice and Survival of Small Not-for-Profit Organisations", a paper by Tirrania Suhood, coordinator of Blacktown Alcohol and other Drugs Family Services. She makes the point that SNGOs are a vital part of the healthy dynamic society, that they are generally close to the communities they serve, they are flexible and they provide an independent voice for their clients.

Yet, as I think in Canberra we are very well aware, many SNGOs walk a fine line between survival and extinction. If government is to have these organisations to draw on, to provide the ground-level guidance that it needs, and to be a source of innovation and development, then it has to ensure that they can survive. It is from those small groups that you are more likely to see innovation and I think innovation is a very important quality, if we are going to have services that are actually meeting the needs of people.

There is an issue facing the community sector in Canberra generally, and the ACT government is yet to face up to it. And, again, I feel a bit like a broken record on this. The Liberal opposition members can scarcely express surprise and concern here with any integrity, as it is years of neglect on their part which has given rise to some of this problem. But one of the big inadequacies of this budget is that there is no plan to bring the sector up to a viable level. The SACS award, for example, which covers most of the community sector, is set only at the level of a safety net. Even as a senior policy officer in the community sector, you would be paid less than an ASO6 in the public service-probably more like an ASO4. If anyone ought to be concerned about a reasonable rate of pay for people in the human service areas, it should be the Labor Party government. At this stage, however, the community sector still seems to be the poor relation.

The consequences are, of course, that there is a continual drain of energy and talent into the government sector and the large NGOs. The cost is that the most creative and responsive agencies are continually robbed of capacity. It is a very silly imbalance, because it does not produce the outcomes that we all want to see.

The same thing goes for accommodation and resources. The Minister for Planning and for Education, Youth and Family Services, judging from his letter to me, has not gone in to bat for the Griffin Centre or any other community services in QIC's Bunda Street development. If you believed in a sustainable community, or that one of the core tasks of government is to address disadvantage, as Labor Party philosophy espouses, then you would start your thinking on these issues.

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