Page 2368 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 16 June 2009
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information. The information is not in a consistent format in annual reports, as I can say, having gone through one cycle of them already.
There is one annual whole-of-government reporting document. It is the budget. That would seem to me to be the logical place to put the whole-of-government indicators, particularly because the budget is the process by which the government decides where it is going to spend the money and, to work out where you are going to spend the money, surely you need to know what the money is going to be spent on, how effectively it is going to be spent. That, to me, is the role of the strategic and accountability indicators—to tell you what the money is actually going to and how effectively it is being spent.
The government has created a number of key plans like weathering the change and the Canberra plan but, given the lack of reporting on them, it is hard to see whether we were acting on the strategies within them and whether they are good and useful plans. I know that, if I was sitting there trying to decide in cabinet how the money should best be allocated, I would want to know more about the indicators, where the money is going and how effectively it is being spent.
I suggest we expand our recommendation 9, which is about electronic reporting of the budget, to include reporting on the key indicators electronically. The frustrating thing is that I am sure the government, in fact, does have this information but it chooses not to make it part of the budget reports, which means that we go through this process, which is frustrating for the members of the committee and, clearly from the Chief Minister’s comments, frustrating for the government in terms of trying to get more information out of the government. I would really urge the government to report at a greater level in the first place. Do it electronically so that we do not waste trees, but do it.
Being a Green, I asked all departments about their efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, especially in the context of Mr Corbell’s recent and most welcome announcement that the government was aiming for zero net greenhouse emissions from the ACT. Also, the government previously, in 2007, committed to the weathering the change strategy; so this should be part of government agencies’ agendas. It was adopted in 2007 and it said:
The ACT Government believes that a reduction in emissions by 60% of 2000 levels by 2050 is an appropriate and realistic long-term target.
It also said:
To measure progress and meet this target, the ACT will aim for a milestone of limiting emissions to 2000 levels, or 4,059,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, by 2025.
So I asked questions of the all the agencies. Positively I did find that education said that yes, it was aiming at zero net C02 emissions by 2017, although it did not have a plan to achieve that. The other agencies generally seem not really to have heard that greenhouse gas reduction in their agencies was something that was meant to happen or else they thought it was DECCEW’s job to look after this.
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