Page 2623 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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annual reports hearings. I was a member of the committee and I heard Mr Stanhope threatening agency heads concerning their performance agreements if they did not heed the Auditor-General’s recommendations and use the global reporting indicators.
Last year, as part of its formal budget papers, the government released a supplementary paper entitled Framework for future budget presentations: discussion paper. The paper noted the government’s commitment to sustainability and its intent to embed sustainability principles into government practice. What has happened? The opposite seems to have happened. The focus seems to have become even more fixated on standard economic performance measures.
I have spent a long time talking about triple bottom line practices, and that is because they seem to me to have gone missing in action and reappeared as the elephant in the room that no-one else is talking about. It is worrying that no-one else in this Assembly talks about this. It was very discouraging to find at the mid-term meeting of public accounts committees in April this year that only a few of the states knew what I was talking about when I talked about sustainability indicators and reporting on the triple bottom line. The delegates from the commonwealth public accounts committee certainly did not. The delegates from Western Australia did not even seem to know that their state has a commissioner of sustainability. Perhaps they do not know because they had a Costello review, too, didn’t they!
As the May 2004 supplementary budget papers stated, a triple bottom line approach involves a multidimensional and holistic view of human activities and their impacts. I cannot emphasise enough the importance the Greens place on the opening up of policy development to public scrutiny and participation. Sustainability principles are one issue on which the public must be brought along. Governments cannot get too far ahead of a community on these issues. On the other hand, this one needs to catch up, despite the bright rhetoric. Sadly, it has become apparent that until it becomes electorally damaging to ignore social and environmental indicators, governments are unlikely to find the courage to stand up to the financial markets and ratings agencies.
The homelessness strategy, which was to be the pilot for the government’s new poverty impact analysis, has effectively been abandoned. Hopefully, as the Costello reforms recede into history, this government and its successors will rediscover the value of community infrastructure building. If, as this budget makes more likely, the Greens recapture the balance of power in this place, it will not be a coincidence that community housing, triple bottom line accounting and environmental sustainability will return to much sharper focus.
The government’s new measures to raise $62.7 million in additional revenue raise concerns about their poverty impact. We are starting to hear about the negative impact they are having on low-income households that are not eligible for pensioner concessions. It does not seem that the government paid sufficient attention to the likely negative impact of these revenue measures when they are coupled with, and magnified by, the introduction of WorkChoices and the Welfare to Work program. The Community Inclusion Board’s work on poverty-proofing the budget has not been given even token attention by the government this year. Indeed, it looks as though the board itself may be a victim of the government’s austerity measures.
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