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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (24 June) . . Page.. 2275 ..
MS TUCKER
(continuing):I could seek to remove today all the money to be spent on the Gungahlin Drive extension. That sounds like a good idea to me, much better than voting against a media unit that they can have anyway. The basic point I want to make today is that it does not serve the people of Canberra to be playing games like this one, putting up amendments that you do not think will get up anyway so you do not worry about them, and not consulting with people in the Assembly.
MS DUNDAS
(12.19): I will also speak to the Chief Minister's Department line in the budget and get it over and done with. I welcome the funding to tackle elder abuse, which follows the recommendations of an Assembly inquiry. However, there are quite a few areas where the CMD budget shows evidence of a skewed set of priorities.The committee inquiry into the status of women came up with a long list of recommendations; yet there are no new initiatives in this budget to implement these recommendations. That shows that the status of women was not a priority for the Stanhope government. The discussion that was had during the estimates process about how women-specific initiatives were being considered as part of this budget was quite disappointing.
I do hope that the recommendations of the committee that inquired into the status of women and the work of the Office of Women will be picked up by this government, not ignored. That would mean targeting new money at women's programs. We still exist in a time where we do need to have a separate focus on how policy impacts on women and how women can have their voices heard in our democratic processes. That is something that does need to be considered in a budget context and it was disappointing to see that it was not a priority of the government this year.
Also, there was discussion when we were looking at the status of women and the work of the Office of Women about their role being to make sure that women's issues permeate throughout government and there is a whole-of-government approach to women and, as Ms Tucker has already discussed, a whole-of-government approach to sustainability. Despite the fact that these new offices have been in place for 18 months, there appears to have been little outcome from the work being done. We still do not have triple bottom line accounting in this budget. We are still lacking information on how the status of women in the ACT is improving or otherwise.
Both the Office of Sustainability and the Office of Women were not key players in the development of the budget. I would have expected them to have been. I find that disappointing. We are to a certain extent recognising that these two areas need to be prioritised by setting up offices to look into them, yet their role appears to be limited.
One of the key pieces of legislation that the government puts down every year is the appropriation bill, the budget, yet the Office of Women and the Office of Sustainability were resoundingly left out of the development of the budget and there is little evidence to show that sustainability and the status of women have permeated through the public service departments and these issues have been considered. I do hope that the government will reprioritise the work on that and place greater focus on these two areas of great need.
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