Page 3298 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 October 2006
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Children and Young People Commissioner has been combined with that of Disability and Community Services Commissioner. The Children and Young People Commissioner’s budget has been slashed from $392,000 in 2006-07 as per the 2005-06 budget to around 20 per cent of that in 2006-07 as per the 2006-07 budget. Mr Corbell’s media release of Tuesday states:
The decision to alter the structure of the Commission is consistent with a number of decisions made in this year’s Budget to reduce expenditure on optional overhead expenses and to streamline administrative processes.
A 50 per cent cut in funding and a doubling of executive responsibilities does not sound like a mere reduction of overhead expenditures to me. Under what school of creative accounting do two executive positions come to be classified as mere overhead expenses?
The ACT Greens supported the establishment of the Human Rights Commission in 2005. We thought it sensible to co-locate the commissioners so they could share administrative functions, undertake joint work on areas of cross-sector importance and identify systemic issues across government and non-government service sectors. We supported the broad intention behind the initial legislation. However, we thought that that original legislation went too far in transferring responsibilities and decision making from individual commissioners to the commission as a whole. Decisions regarding resources were to be made by the commission as a whole, with the casting vote belonging to the president.
Under the new administrative arrangements it will be up to the remaining three commissioners to collectively decide in what manner resources will be allocated. It also appears that one commissioner can call a meeting, only two need to turn up to constitute a quorum and two out of the three commissioners are required to vote yes to get something through. Either way, the government appears to have set up a difficult system for deciding the level of resources the remaining three commissioners will receive.
I wonder how three generalist specialist commissioners will decide if a project of one commissioner, or one role performed by a dual commissioner, is more worthy of receiving funding than those of the other commissioners. Does this mean that the two commissioners looking after two portfolios will automatically receive more funding than the one commissioner who has only one portfolio? One can only imagine the internal debates that will go on inside one commissioner who has two portfolios. Perhaps the government should consider sending the new commissioners to a Greens school weekend to receive some training in consensus decision making! Difficulties with the proposed decision-making process could result in substantial delays in decision making and lead to conflict that might jeopardise the work of individual commissioners.
Looking at both models the ACT government proposed in 2005 and 2006, individual commissioners will lose considerable autonomy, compromising their capacity to set priorities, make decisions regarding commission-initiated investigations and provide reports to government. There are many examples of various governments with something to hide slashing the funding of ombudsmen and auditors to limit their ability to undertake self-referred investigations into systemic problems, so I am just asking: how much is that behind these cuts?
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