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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 10 Hansard (Tuesday, 24 August 2004) . . Page.. 4014 ..

That the report be authorised for publication.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

MR SMYTH: I move:

That the report be noted.

Mr Speaker, this report of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts deals with the Auditor-General’s report concerning the management of fraud and corruption prevention in the public sector. Again, the Auditor-General has taken the interesting path of making suggestions rather than recommendations and has made 34 suggestions in this case.

The government has accepted 31 of the suggestions and disagreed with just three of them. Of those three, the committee makes no comment on one but has chosen to side with the Auditor-General on the other two. As a consequence, we have made two recommendations in relation to those two suggestions that the government has not taken up.

The first suggestion that the government disagreed with was suggestion 5. The auditor suggested that suitably qualified or experienced personnel should be appointed with specific accountabilities for the whole-of-government implementation of the integrity framework. The government disagreed, saying that that was the role of the Chief Minister’s Department. The committee has agreed with the government, saying that it believes that the government’s commitment to ensuring the whole-of-government implementation of an integrity framework has to be supported by the employment of suitably qualified or experienced staff.

Sorry, Mr Speaker, I have skipped a suggestion. In fact, the government disagreed with suggestion 1. In suggestion 1 the auditor recommended that the Public Sector Management Act be looked at in a wider context. The government disagreed with that, saying that it thought that it was appropriate to deal with it in a piece-by-piece way, amending sections as required. The auditor reckons that that approach does not give the best outcome. In this case, the committee has agreed with the auditor and suggested in recommendation 1 that the Public Sector Management Act be amended to legislate for the conduct of fraud and corruption risk assessment and prevention treatments.

I have already done the second suggestion. The third suggestion was suggestion 12. The auditor suggested that a summary actually quantifying the extent and cost of identified cases of fraud and corruption in the public service should be collated and included in the Commissioner for Public Administration’s annual reports, to give an overall view of what was happening across the public sector. The government disagreed, saying that the information was already provided in the agencies’ annual reports.

In this case, the committee agreed again with the Auditor-General, saying that if you really want to get the full picture and if you are truly interested in accountability and transparency, you should not be afraid to publish the entire picture in one place. Recommendation 2 deals with that. It states that the Commissioner for Public

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