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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 716 ..

I draw the government’s attention to recommendation 2, which is cross-government. This will require amendment to the Chief Minister’s annual report directions. The recommendation asks that the directions provide for agencies with an external scrutiny function, for a specific section, on issues of significant concern regarding the performance of other agencies.

It was clear, regarding the lack of statutory reporting on possible child abuse of kids in care, that the flags of worry did not go up quite enough. They certainly did not go up sufficiently for enough people in this place to view the issue with the concern that they should have. Ms Tucker made the point that almost all of us here missed it at one point or another. It is incumbent upon us, wherever we can, to develop flags for members so that if an issue is of concern we see it more clearly.

When a statutory agency is reporting in one annual report but talking about a relationship that it has with another agency, we are hoping to see that the statutory agency would report if the commissioner, or whoever, is concerned about a given issue. In this report we are saying that it should be part of the process. It matters not whether it is one department reporting on its arrangements with another department or whether it is a statutory agency reporting on its relationship with a government department. We believe that, if there is a specific section in every annual report, we may avoid the Assembly missing important issues. It is not a solution to the problem; it is just one of the flags.

The first recommendation in this report talks about performance contracts with senior staff in the Department of Education, Youth, and Family Services containing the requirement of compliance with statutory obligations in order to obtain satisfactory appraisal. In fact, the satisfaction of those statutory obligations ought to be built into any performance agreement between any senior executive anywhere in the service.

It matters not whether those people are on workplace agreements, AWAs or a straight salary. I would hope here is an agreement, between the CEO and the relevant minister and between the senior executives and the CEO, on expectations of achievement on the part of those officers. Where those officers have a statutory obligation, we recommend that it be included in those performance contracts.

If my memory serves me correctly, when the Children and Young People Act was introduced by the former government in 2000, the current Leader of the Opposition made the very valid point that this legislation would be the vehicle to hold CEOs accountable to statutory obligations, or something along those lines. This recommendation takes the point that Mr Smyth made in that speech a little further.

It is not the first time a report on annual reports has raised the issue of meaningful quality indicators across government agencies for inclusion in budget and performance statements. I will just use the words “yet again” and ask members to read that passage. I won’t go through that in any great detail; it is pretty self-explanatory. We sometimes only see workload indicators in annual reports and budget things, and we do not actually see a measure of the quality or efficacy of the program. Sometimes the figures that are there are just lies, damn lies and statistics to bluff people like us—there are so many of them. We need to be a little bit more strategic. I would rather see fewer indicators if they were meaningful than the ones we have now.

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