Page 2228 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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of Canberra for supposedly living beyond the territory’s means when, in truth, the deficit was caused by the government’s hopeless inability to accurately forecast revenue.
You can be sure, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, that when the prison is shown to blow the budget to smithereens, they again will blame someone else. Of course, the same will apply to the GDE. These ministers actually need to accept their responsibility as ministers, but they seem to continually refuse to do so. That must be frustrating for the Auditor-General.
The truth is—and I know this will come as a shock to those five ministers over there—that it is not the responsibility of public servants to ensure that the Auditor-General’s recommendations are implemented. It is the ministers of the government that must take responsibility for the lack of accountability, effectiveness and efficiency of the ACT public sector.
Why is that so? It is so because the Auditor-General reports, through the Speaker, to the Assembly. I will repeat that. The Auditor-General, through the Speaker, reports to the Assembly. She does not report to bureaucrats; she reports to the Assembly. The implication of this is that the ministers responsible for their various portfolios—and I use the word “responsible” advisedly—must take charge of the implementation of the Auditor-General’s recommendations.
They must take those recommendations on board, respond to them and ensure that their departmental officials implement them in a timely manner. A delay of three years is outrageous. It is an indictment of the laziness of this government. The Auditor-General should not have to waste her resources on following up to such an extent on previous audits. The Auditor-General’s greatest concern in relation to the implementation of recommendations is in those areas where there are corporate issues common across agencies. The Auditor-General said:
This highlights the need for central agencies such as Chief Minister’s Department and Treasury to play a more effective leadership role and oversight the implementation of Audit recommendations on whole-of-government issues.
The responsibility for this lies fairly and squarely at the feet of the Chief Minister, for it is he who has responsibility for the whole of government.
The budget papers for 2007-08 for the Chief Minister’s Department talk a lot about whole-of-government leadership and management. Indeed, there is an entire output for governance. Why is it, then, that implementation of the whole-of-government recommendations attracts the Auditor-General’s specific attention? It is because the Chief Minister, like his four cabinet colleagues, refuses to take responsibility. He refuses to take the lead and he refuses to manage. He takes this attitude because he refuses to expose himself and his government to any level of accountability.
Implementation of the Auditor-General’s recommendations might mean that the government will have to perform better, that it will actually have to take some action on something, that it will have to submit itself to public scrutiny or that it will have to
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