Page 2137 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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On insurance, I welcome the implementation of a group insurance initiative for non-profit organisations in collaboration with Volunteering ACT. This sounds like an excellent initiative and I congratulate the government on doing something positive that promises to have a real benefit in terms of freeing up the scarce resources of community groups which would be much better spent elsewhere.
In relation to affordable housing, I would like to revisit my suggestion last night, in talking about the Land Rent Bill, that Treasury should set up some kind of reference group to provide it with insight and guidance regarding people living with income insecurity. There is a history with various housing schemes that a proportion of people that we are seeking to assist into home ownership or security in the house where they live—they should not need to own it to feel secure—can be caught out. I would like to see the community inclusion board have a role, or a reference group drawn together from community-based experts, to ensure that the everyday realities confronting people with limited and unpredictable incomes is factored into Treasury’s management of its programs. I do not seek to cast the officers of the department in a poor light; rather, I want to make the point that Treasury itself, by definition, tends to have a narrow focus, giving rise to the need for a more structured approach to social impacts of its programs.
On regulatory impact statement processes, it is disappointing to see yet again that the government has failed to listen to its own Auditor-General and failed to deliver on its own commitments to implement a more socially and environmentally aware system of assessing and measuring the impacts of government programs and policies. There is no funding for a climate change impact analysis for major projects and developments. There is no funding for benchmark studies to obtain measurements of various quality of life and environmental vitality factors so that we can get an understanding of what changes our actions are causing, whether or not we measure them.
One of the most salutary effects of this kind of policy is that it focuses the minds of policy and decision makers on the environmental and social implications of their actions. It also makes it harder for a government to claim that money spent on roadworks, new buses or introduced weeds is money spent on greenhouse abatement measures. The sadly ironic thing is that this kind of fraudulent nonsense does make up the bulk of the government’s greenhouse abatement strategy; it was certainly the bulk of measures announced in this budget.
I welcome the government’s commitment to a more environmentally responsible, whole-of-life assessment procurement policy. Any funding spent on training procurement officers on these principles is money well spent and I refer the Treasurer to his own media release of 14 September 2007 when he, along with other COAG ministers, agreed to commit to sustainable procurement. I would be very interested to find out how that is tracking; I will be asking a question on notice about that.
I also point out an initiative that has been taken by the Victorian Treasurer and the Department of Treasury and Finance. There is an advertisement in this week’s Canberra Times—we have to watch they are not poaching our experts—looking for climate change team senior policy advisers. The ad says:
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