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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 717 ..

There are other recommendations in here, which I refer members to at their leisure, but recommendation 5 is one I wanted to do because it is a little pet hate of mine. It requires a change also in the Chief Minister’s directions, recommending that the government amend the format of various disclosures to provide for accurate variance reporting where the target is expressed as a percentage. The current direction, requiring people to do simple arithmetic when they take a variation of a targeted percentage with the actual percentage achieved, is misleading. In fact, it encourages people to be misleading.

Let’s suggest the target is 5 per cent and the achievement is 3 per cent. What is seen in the annual reports and the budget is minus 2 per cent. That is not so; it is 2/5, which is 40 per cent. It gives a misleading image about the performance of that agency. In the example I just quoted, the difference between 2 per cent out and 40 per cent out is quite significant. It works both ways. I would encourage the drafters of the Chief Minister’s direction to amend the format. I understand there was a bit of resistance from Treasury, so I exhort the Treasurer to use his influence in this.

I reiterate that the report into the 2002-03 annual finance reports is all about looking back on history and looking back on performance. As far as this is concerned, we come to an end on 30 June 2003 and we are looking backwards on that. I will wrap up by congratulating the Department of Disability, Housing, and Community Services for their first go at it. If you measured the officers who did that annual report against the other ones who have been around for centuries, the other people could take a leaf out of their book. What we saw was a refreshing go at it. It was easy to read, easy to work through and it was not full of the professional bureaucratic nonsense that we know is all too often contained in annual reports and budget explanations. I commend the report to the Assembly.

MS DUNDAS (11.04): I, too, think that the Standing Committee on Community Services made some important points on annual financial reports. One is the fact that, when we were reading through the 2002-03 annual reports, we were getting a sense of dEjA vu. Issues that we were told had been addressed or moved forward had not been; they were coming up again in annual reports as issues of concern. That specifically relates to the Department of Education, Youth and Family Services and their requirement to fulfil statutory obligations and pass on information to the Office of the Community Advocate.

It was a concern that this was still an issue after many public hearings on this matter through the 2002-03 financial year and that we found it necessary to repeat excerpts from our last report into the rights, interests, and wellbeing of children and young people. To a certain extent, as there was no point in our just making a recommendation and leaving it at that, it was important that we drew the government’s attention to the fact that we had already said that this was a problem and we had already been told that this problem was being fixed. Yet, again, we had evidence before us that it was not being fixed and that the problem still existed.

When read in conjunction with the Department of Education, Youth and Family Services report and the education committee’s investigation into that, which was tabled in February, it is concerning that there is a lot of information that we are not being told we have to dig for or that we have to wait months to find out. We are not seeing full, frank

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