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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2002 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4289 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

overworked, it will not function as a council. There were general concerns about how that council will be selected. Daniel Stubbs said there needed to be an open and wide selection process, that cultural change was needed, and that Mick Reid had dealt with some of that. How do you that? He raised some questions there.

The role of the council is really to refine the draft set of key performance indicators in the plan, and to monitor progress. This is certainly not in any way suggesting that the indigenous health plan does not exist, or that I was not aware of it. The indigenous health plan and the process involved with it is not the process that I asked for, where you would articulate short-term, medium-term and long-term goals, unless this council is actually a policy-making body. I did not think it would be, because advisory bodies are usually not policy-making bodies. It is government that ultimately makes the policy decisions, informed by community consultation and the work of the council. I did say that in my original presentation.

I did not say at any point-and I think Mr Stanhope misrepresented me when he said this-that the bureaucrats would just come in and write a strategy over the top of the community work or the council. The point is that the council has a monitoring and implementation oversight role, but what is it monitoring and what is it overseeing? That is the thing that we are asking for: that we have an implementation strategy that is developed with the community by government, so we have some capacity as an Assembly, and as a community, to see how well the government is progressing with these admirable goals.

All the various strategies that exist have to be refined to definite targets and time lines. The strategies that exist are also quite often not tight in that way. All these strategies exist, and I acknowledge them and I commend the work, but that does not take away from what I am asking for here today.

MRS DUNNE (5.35): I will be speaking to the original motion. What we have here today is a reprise of what we had all through the estimates process, when members of the opposition and members of the crossbench were asking the government, "Where are the performance measures?"

In the budget process we saw performance measures taken out of budget papers, taken out of the departmental agreements and, for the most part, disappearing. They just kept saying, "Don't you worry, Mrs Dunne, the Auditor-General has very strong views about performance indicators and we are out there preparing performance indicators."

Here we are, six months later, and when we ask this health minister for some performance indicators in one of the most crucial areas of public policy in this territory, what does he do? He has a spac attack at the audacity of this opposition in asking for performance measures. What's more, this opposition has been so audacious as to actually take his lack of ideas and substitute them with some substance. What does he do? He has a spac attack. He goes over the top, as usual.

MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, please. Mrs Dunne has the floor.

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