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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Wednesday, 3 March 2004) . . Page.. 630 ..

This call came about because it was clear that many ACT government policy and funding decisions were not based on evidence or an understanding of the reality on the ground for people using services or the workers delivering them; nor were they made with any concern for long-term sustainability. Instead, politics, media pressure groups and the electoral cycle are often the major determinants of decisions. While all these players are important, it is also essential that they all have an opportunity to see as much as possible what the reality is in terms of community needs and resources, and that is about evidence and data being collected.

A social plan can set out the aspirations of the community, in addition to information including statistics, current and projected unmet need and a strategic policy and action plan. It should have a central role in identifying the areas of social need and determining priorities for action, as well as describing implementation, evaluation and monitoring processes, and this document falls short at that level. For example, the legislation in New South Wales requires all councils in New South Wales to develop a social or community plan and report on identified access and equity activities in their annual reports. Essential components of these plans include a demographic profile of the community; a needs assessment across a range of priority issues developed using a participatory process; information about specific target groups which must include children, young people, women, the aged, people with disabilities, Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander peoples and people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds; assessment of previous social plans and recommended actions.

These requirements are a useful structure for guiding the social planning process and I will be interested to see what framework the government has created for reviewing the social plan in the future. I believe it is essential that a gender perspective is brought into the development of the social plan and that there is a gender auditing criterion process against which the plan can be checked. It was disappointing to hear the Chief Minister’s response to my question on this in the public hearing of the Public Accounts Committee in December 2003 when he basically dismissed the need to integrate the gender perspective into the plan. Just referring the plan to the ACT Office for Women is not adequate. Gender based analysis should be integrated into all policy and practice, as was recommended in the status of women report in November 2002. It is also important that such an analysis include different groups of men and women within the community, such as indigenous peoples, people who are other than heterosexual and people who are from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds.

I am pleased to see the introduction of poverty proofing, which is a process by which government agencies assess policies and programs at design and review stages in relation to the likely impact they will have on poverty and inequalities that are likely to lead to poverty. This concept can also be applied to a gender audit to review whether policies will have a particular effect on a particular gender. For example, one area where you can see this should be applied is housing. We are really pleased to see in the social plan that the government has committed to increasing the supply of public and community housing in the territory, and I welcome this announcement, as I did the announcement of an additional $33 million for the sector, and hope this is merely the beginning of more contributions and growth in the social housing sector.

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