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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 02 Hansard (Thursday, 4 March 2004) . . Page.. 718 ..

and fearless advice being provided to this Assembly through annual reports. And that leaves us with the situation we are currently in, where there is a lot of confusion about what has been happening in departments. There is a lot of confusion about how we go forward in fixing those issues.

I draw the government and the Assembly’s attention to recommendation 1 of this committee report—which is actually a repeat of the recommendation we made in the Children and Young People report—about the need to require compliance with the statutory obligations of senior staff, so that we have a mechanism to make sure that statutory obligations are being met.

One of the other important things Mr Hargreaves touched on is how external agencies that also have a role in looking at departments are executing their jobs and how concerns that they have are raised in their annual reports. It is quite important that, when an agency has an external scrutiny function, it is made quite clear when problems arise with that external scrutiny. It needs to be almost shouted from the rooftops, as opposed to being written in very small font at the back of the report. One reason why we made recommendation 2 is to include a specific section in all annual reports that says, “It is my job to have a statutory oversight of these agencies, and these are the concerns that I have,” or, if there are no concerns, “There are no concerns, and everything is running smoothly.”

The other point I would like to make echoes something that our chair indicated. I would like to thank the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services for their first annual report. It was quite refreshing to read the chief executive’s report, in that she spoke of both the positives in the first year of the department and the challenges they had to address and of the challenges that lay ahead. That was refreshing to see.

It does not mean that the report was 100 per cent perfect, and there are things that need to be fixed up in the Disability, Housing and Community Services annual report. But their willingness to say, “These are the challenges we are facing; these are the issues that we need to address,” was quite refreshing. It is something other agencies need to take on so that full, frank and fearless advice can be provided to this Assembly and so that we can be fully informed about what action we need to take.

In the case of the OCA and the Disability annual reports, we are looking after people who are quite vulnerable and who are in need of intensive support and care. We need to know how that is being provided and what the challenges are so that we can support people in the community who need it most.

MRS CROSS (11.09): I won’t repeat the things that were eloquently put by my fellow committee members, Mr Hargreaves and Ms Dundas; suffice to say that this matter is of great concern, especially to this committee, given that it put a lot of work into the rights, interests and wellbeing of children and young people when it tabled its report in August last year. The fact that we have had to reiterate some of the gravest of those recommendations in the report that Mr Hargreaves tabled this morning only proves that we have a serious flaw in our system.

I will say this, though, to the staff of the departments listening this morning, or who will read what we have said: don’t feel that this is a criticism of you individually. There are

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