Page 2501 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 17 June 2009
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intervention in arts organisations and their imposition of changes in governance structures that the ACT government intends or hopes to impose on ACT arts organisations. I think that is not a great example of helping not-for-profit organisations to make their way in the community. Often, the best thing that the government can do, to paraphrase something that Mr Barr has said repeatedly in this place, is to get out of their way.
There are many things that the government can do and there are things that we should be working to do, in government and in this Assembly, to make the lives of people who provide services through not-for-profit agencies better. That does not necessarily require one big, all-encompassing document; it requires careful listening to the needs of individual sectors and ensuring that we are attentive to the needs of people in a range of sectors rather than having a one-size-fits-all approach. I am concerned that a compact such as the one championed by Ms Porter will not necessarily have the great outcomes that she anticipates. But that may be just a different approach coming from a different tradition.
There is no doubt that members in this place truly value the work and the contribution of the not-for-profit sector in this community and across the country, and we should be resolving to be listening to those communities—because it is more than one community; it is not an amorphous whole. There are a number of components that reflect the broad diversity of our community. We should be listening to that broad diversity, we should be responding to that broad diversity and ensuring that people who go out and do good work for the community on a voluntary basis, or often on a low-paid basis, are not hindered by government but in fact are aided by government. We should be intervening where it is necessary to make their lives better and we should be looking constantly at ways of improving and limiting our intervention where it is unnecessary.
One of the things that people in the community sector often say to me is that they are so reliant on government funding and the level of accountability for government funding means that they spend a great amount of their time chasing and acquitting grants and accounting for their spending—all of which is important. I do not want to be interpreted as saying I do not think it is important that when government money is spent by community organisations it should not be acquitted and accounted for. But sometimes what we ask them to do is so onerous that they spend too much of their time talking to the government about the money that the government gave them and not enough time providing services to the community that was funded by the government. These are vitally important issues.
I welcome Ms Porter’s bringing to our attention this matter of the vitality and importance of the not-for-profit sector. I have an open mind about the effectiveness and efficaciousness of a compact. But putting that aside, I do not resile from supporting the general thrust of Ms Porter’s motion because it is important that we recognise the great contribution of the not-for-profit sector to this community and to the wider nation.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (4.55): I would like to thank Ms Porter for bringing this motion to the Assembly. The organisations in
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