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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4271 ..

Except, apparently, from the opposition. Faced with such a plan, what can a constructive opposition do? We do not have the departmental resources available to the minister. We do not expect to be able to completely rewrite his health plan 2002. It is his plan. It is the health plan that he will be judged on. However, as the alternative government, we have a higher priority-the health outcomes of the people of Canberra.

We can provide an insight into what he ought to have demanded from his bureaucrats, and we can do so from a sensible basis. We know that if there are to be genuine achievements, if there is to be genuine progress, then the weight of academic opinion demands that the policy cycle require measurement and evaluation.

In Bridgman and Davis' Australian policy cycle model a process is offered that helps to bring structure to an approach that might otherwise appear chaotic and unordered. Surely those who advised and those who wrote this policy plan were aware of this type of model.

The gurus of policy evaluation, analysis and implementation agree that policy implementation cannot be achieved without identifying specific goals and allocating implementation targets. These commentators of policy development include people such as Gardner, the editor of Health Policy Development, Implementation and Evaluation in Australia, Davis and Ashton in Health and Public Policy in New Zealand, Palmer and Short in Health Care and Public Policy and Parsons in Public Policy: An Introduction to Theory and Practice of Policy Analysis. That is the academic background, but it should be a matter of just plain common sense. If you are to achieve outcomes, you have to set goals and targets and you have to be able to assess your achievements against those goals and targets.

Mr Deputy Speaker, to be constructive, the motion is framed in two parts. In the first part we present the challenge. However, we expect the minister, in the spirit of constructive criticism, to rise to that challenge. We understand that, with our limited resources, we may have set an occasional unrealistic goal. Therefore, the motion allows for a process of reconsideration and, if the minister finds an unrealistic goal, he could do one of two things. He could slip into his old opposition approach and guffaw and poke fun about why he thinks a particular target is impossible, or he could respond positively to the constructive nature of the motion and return to the Assembly with an alternative.

In the second part of the motion, we have provided general and specific measures against a wide range of the plan's goals. These targets are lifted from the Health Minister's own goals. This is what you should have demanded from your department, Minister. If you want to go to the next election saying that you have achieved something, if you want to be able to argue that you have not just wallowed in a sea of philosophy, plans, consultation and strategies, you set targets and you are measured against them.

Our method has been to provide a set of realistic goals. In fact, we have attempted to be particularly conservative in our approach. That approach has been to interpret the lofty goals that have been identified and then make a judgment about the sort of improvement that this Assembly should expect and, indeed, the people of Canberra should expect over the period of this government. It is a judgment call. That is why the motion allows the government to come back and say that it can do better or that we have asked for the impossible and it will need to modify.

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