Page 2645 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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If government funding to the Audit Office is reduced, the number of performance audits will drop and the level of scrutiny on government agencies will be lowered.
And that is the intention. That is the intention of our Chief Minister. He wants the number of performance audits to drop; he wants the level of scrutiny on government to be lowered. The editorial goes on:
This would be an unfortunate outcome for ACT taxpayers. Large bureaucracies need the checks and balances of an independent watchdog. Such accountability is central to our style of democracy.
Stanhope’s reaction to criticism by the Audit Office should be to defend his administration’s record, not to attack the bearer of the bad news. Who else is going to ride shotgun on the internal operations of government bodies, if not the independent Audit Office?
(Second speaking period taken.) And that is at the nub of it. On the one hand, you have got a government that does not want scrutiny. But on the other hand, you have got a government that does not want to understand where it is getting things wrong. Indeed, the realisation, both in Australia and in places overseas, is that audit offices save you money. On the one hand, they can save you money. On the other hand, they can extend the value that you receive for the dollar that you spend.
It is quite interesting to note that in the United Kingdom their National Audit Office—and I quote from page 17 of their annual report for 2007-08—reported:
… we increased our target to achieve £9 for every £1 of net expenditure, up from £8:1 to £1 in 2006-07. We achieved the target with financial impacts of £656 million in 2007-08.
And what the English audit office is saying, what the English auditor-general is saying, is “We save you money. We help you spend your money more wisely. We can actually help you improve service delivery. We can help you improve the number of services that you deliver and the quantum of services that you deliver.” And what the English audit office has found, and what the English parliament accepts, is that they actually save money.
So at a time when we are desperately short of cash, when we have got those temporary deficits for seven years—temporary deficits; “temporary” used to mean short term—we have a mechanism to help make the spend more effective. But what does the government want to do? They wish to attack that. I think it is worth reading a couple of paragraphs from the National Audit Office annual report. It says, under “Financial Impact”:
We are committed to achieving beneficial change from our audit work and our financial impacts target both encourage us to focus on that objective and help us measure our success in delivering such change.
They actually measure it in the United Kingdom. They quantify it. It continues:
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