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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 1 Hansard (18 February) . . Page.. 66 ..

MRS DUNNE (continuing):

We had the opportunity to invite members of the committee to attend so that they could be across these issues, but that would have been a fairly cumbersome way of dealing with this matter. This is why we have recommendations in the report that we should be looking at a better, more streamlined approach that gives an overarching look at annual reports, and that this should be done in consultation and perhaps in step with the budget estimates process. I think the process that has been taken in this Assembly in relation to annual reports is less than satisfactory.

The committee highlights the problem of having multi-minister portfolios. Three ministers-the Minister for Urban Services and Minister for the Arts and Heritage, Mr Wood; the Minister for Planning, Mr Corbell; and the Minister for the Environment, the Chief Minister, Mr Stanhope-all have responsibility for the good governance and accountability of some element of the Urban Services portfolio. We are concerned that this has potential for problems with accountability and overlapping decisions on policies.

We are concerned that this situation is endemic across the ACT government, and it calls for rigorous and highly functional management and leadership styles to ensure sound management and communication and decision-making frameworks to deal with matters that overlap, and to ensure that there are close-working linkages between elements of the portfolio.

There is the difficulty of potential confusion from time to time as a result of the administrative orders and the multiple ministries. The chief executive officers have multiple reporting lines and responsibilities. We know that this is concomitant with us being a small jurisdiction with now five ministers and a small number of departments, but it is something that all members in this place need to be aware of.

One of the issues that is of particular concern to the committee is the issue of consultants and contractors. In the Urban Services portfolio nearly $80 million worth of consultancies are put out to purchase and deliver services, and it is not really straightforward and identifiable from the report what those consultancies do. I think the members of the committee took a very dim view of, say, the contracting out of all the garbage and recycling services as a consultancy service. This is clearly not a consultancy service and should not be listed as such. The same applies to the maintenance contract for ACT housing. It is clearly not consultancy within the classical definition of what consultancies mean, and we have made recommendations that the whole issue of consultants and contractors be reviewed, not just for this portfolio but across portfolios.

The committee was also concerned about presentational issues. Some of the reports are very glossy and look more like publicity brochures than actual annual reports. At the same time, the presentation of the main Urban Services Department report was very difficult to deal with. You had to physically break the binding before you could read the thing in a coherent way.

There are many elements in the report which I hope that the agencies in the Urban Services portfolio will learn from, and I hope that in the future we will see a better and more accountable set of annual reports.

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