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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2271 ..

Time should be made available for future committees to hold night sittings, where needed. Again, that has occurred in the past and I think that it is something that will need to occur in future when necessary. We have made recommendations in that regard and they are quite important.

We made a number of other technical recommendations. For example, we made recommendations in relation to the use of the term “initiative”. All governments tend to like to highlight initiatives. We feel that a government should use the term “initiative” only when it refers to new money or new programs and that it should not be applied to enhancements of any existing programs. Clearly, that is an inappropriate way of using that terminology.

Similarly, we want the government to have a good look at performance measures. In fact, the Treasurer is quoted in the report as saying that performance measures were, generally speaking, crap. The ministers and the head of the Chief Minister’s Department agreed, basically, that the performance measures were unsatisfactory. We think it is essential that the government undertake a review of performance measures to ensure that they are meaningful, that they allow for comparison over time, that they are consistent with measures in ownership agreements and annual reports, that they take into account the needs for triple bottom line reporting, and that they adequately address effectiveness and efficiency. I hope that the government will take that on board.

The report generally was pretty close to being unanimous, but there were a number of issues on which members did disagree. Usually, we managed to work things out and the recommendations were ones of the majority, but there were four instances where there was some disagreement. Mrs Dunne and I felt differently in relation to the women’s budget statement. We commend the government for having it and we made a recommendation in relation to it, but we feel, given that the government has gone down that path, that it would be sensible as well to have specific initiatives that benefit men included in future budgets along the same lines as the women’s budget statement. Our colleagues did not necessarily agree with that, but I think that that would be a quite sensible idea.

The community, as I said, provided some very useful comments. For example, the Limousine Industry Association appeared before us and we made a recommendation along the lines of that of another committee there. I commend that to the government.

There is a lot of angst concerning this budget, as referred to in several sections of this report, in relation to the amount of money this government is spending in the non-government sector. As well as the P&C group for the government schools, we had the Independent Education Union and the Catholic Education Office before us. The non-government sector was particularly concerned that its share of funding increases was only three per cent of the total funding for new schools in the budget, even though it accounted for over 39 per cent of the total ACT school population. The minister pointed out that the budget had increased by 6.6 per cent, or about $35 million, for 43 non-government schools but, quite clearly, there was considerable angst and a fair bit of discussion and questioning in relation to the non-government school sector.

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