Page 2491 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
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he will bring that sector into the terms of reference once he has put the steering group together, perhaps beforehand so that he can choose appropriately.
I also use this opportunity to remind the Chief Minister that the ACT government makes large superannuation investments and that there would be substantial benefits for the Canberra community investing some of our money into community and public housing. In this context, the functional review, or what we have been allowed to see, has shown itself to be entirely inadequate. Because we have not been allowed to see any of it, I am guessing here. It has laid down a framework for a budget that is all about cutting expenditure and raising revenue but has failed to look creatively at how those expenditures and revenues are used.
In respect to some of the more discrete projects, I note that the arboretum has been put on the backburner. I believe it would make sense to proceed more cautiously with the dragway as well, particularly as all government analysis to date has shown it to be economically unviable and socially and environmentally dubious, at best.
The Assembly would be aware that the Greens also oppose the construction of the Gungahlin Drive extension. The $100 million-plus that is now going on a two-lane freeway that is likely to relocate, rather than remove, the places of traffic congestion, at a time when a real improvement in public transport is most viable and vital, seems more and more like a mammoth waste and a missed opportunity.
In the lead-up to the 2004 election, at an ACTCOSS conference, the Chief Minister promised to establish a community sector task force. That task force made recommendations on community sector viability, including pay, superannuation and leave, and sector development. It was wound up in February this year. It recommended that its term be extended in order to contribute to the implementation of the next steps. It is no surprise that recommendation was not accepted. The final report sat quietly for several months before it was finally released in June.
In the budget handed down in the meantime, there were cuts to a number of community organisations without consultation or any discernable policy base. Not everyone in the ACT government has a real fondness for the community sector because community organisations, naturally, focus on their clients and concerns and are much more responsive to those individual needs, rather than the broader responsibilities that ministers and executives see themselves as bearing.
The realities are that innovation in individual support and service delivery comes through the community sector, particularly some of the smaller organisations. That is partly because they are used to doing more with less, but there is a limit to how little that less can be. The quality of outcomes can only be improved, and the cost of services reduced, through strong, collaborative partnerships. That is why this task force and, before that, the community sector funding agreement and the social compact are so important to the future of our society and why the failure to keep faith with those commitments, which this budget represents, is so profoundly destructive.
The problems facing the community sector in the ACT are well known. It faces a turnover rate twice that of the Australian average, due to poor conditions and pay, and a local and national public service quickly snatching up their best and brightest once they
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