Page 2068 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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Motion (by Mr Corbell) put:
That debate be adjourned.
Question resolved in the negative.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (11.51): It has always been the case that members of committees speak to the reports when they are tabled. Annual reports is an interesting process, particularly after an election and because of the delay caused by the election time frame.
There are some important recommendations in this report. The first couple talk about how government agencies report. If you go back through the PAC reports on this topic over the last couple of years you will see similar recommendations about finetuning that process on reporting. In this case, the committee looked particularly at ecologically sustainable development, so that departments fully adhere to the Chief Minister’s directions. We understand that it is an emerging form of reporting but the directions are there, they are quite clear and they should certainly be adhered to.
There are a number of recommendations in regard to the Auditor-General. In particular, the committee recommends that the government require agencies to take up the Auditor-General’s recommendation that agencies review the relevance, usefulness and appropriateness of performance measures reported in their statements of performance. Again, if people were to look back over the years, they would see the words “relevance, usefulness and appropriateness of performance measures” reported as a recommendation in many of these reports.
How we judge governments needs to be consistent over time. With respect to the effectiveness of saying that the cabinet liaison unit will provide briefs to cabinet, that is what they do. To provide briefs as a performance measure is a silly measure. It is important that what is there is not just there to bulk it out, to fill it up, which seems to be a trend, particularly in annual reports—the bigger we make it, the larger and glossier it is. In fact, in some ways, to slim the reports down to useful information rather than providing a glossy advertisement for what the department is up to would be very useful.
We mentioned the Auditor-General’s budget; we will address that later tonight, I am sure. I think it is a shame that the auditor is not being given the tools that she needs to do her job properly.
Recommendation 8 is one that I am particularly interested in. It is about the state of the service report, which this government has discontinued. Many of you would know that the government came to office with the policy of being more open, more honest and more accountable. But the state of the service report was a particularly useful report because it brought together a large amount of information that sits in other sources so that you had it there directly in one document for comparison. I acknowledge that the Chief Minister said, when we spoke to him on this matter, that he would look at its usefulness. I certainly note that a number of people who have
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