Page 2659 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 23 June 2009
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can speak with no-one coming back at him. He is not very confident of his arguments. He is not prepared to get up lest they be rebutted. I was very keen to hear from another member of the executive on this attitude towards the Auditor-General. We know that the Chief Minister does not want to defend his attack. It is hard to know where the Chief Minister’s head is on things like this, whether he is capable of regret and whether or not he is thinking to himself, “Maybe that unwarranted attack on the Auditor-General on Friday wasn’t the right thing to do.” Perhaps that is assigning a little too much grace to the Chief Minister. Indeed, we have not heard from him. Mr Corbell wanted to stand up, and maybe he will stand up at the end of the debate so that he can make a few comments that are not able to be rebutted. Mr Hanson is ready and waiting, I think, to respond, so Mr Corbell should be careful.
We repeat the point that the Auditor-General’s role is to improve accountability, standards and efficiency to help the government perform better. Assigning any other motive to the Auditor-General is unwarranted and unjustified and is not backed by any evidence that has ever been presented to me. If someone has evidence of such motive they should present it; they should put it out there. But short of such evidence, we can only assume that the Auditor-General is performing her role diligently, professionally and impartially—looking at governments, whoever they may be, ministers, whoever they may be, and departments, whoever they may be, making findings and seeking to work with departments to improve accountability and performance.
Unfortunately, what we see from this government is a defensive attitude. Perhaps because they know that in many areas of government they are not performing well they take a defensive attitude. They see the Auditor-General as an enemy. They see the Auditor-General as someone coming in who is going to criticise them, expose their flaws, expose the fact that they are not getting value for taxpayers’ money, expose the fact that ministers are inappropriately interfering in departments and expose the fact that this is a poor performing government which continues to perform poorly and, in fact, gets worse over time.
It is also worth mentioning another quote from the Auditor-General’s evidence which I did not mention earlier. She said:
I would like to add that our performance audit works are not always aimed at saving money—
and that is true—
We aim at improved transparency, improved accountability, the protection of community safety or look at the government decision-making process. Saving money and improving efficiency is only one of many outcomes.
I think that is an important part of this debate that has not been dealt with in detail yet. Saving money—finding ways to help government save money—is a very important part of what the Auditor-General does. But by getting better outcomes in community safety, in health and in all sorts of other areas it means improved lives for Canberrans; it means the quality of the service we get from our government is better. Why would anyone be against that? Why would we have to see a government attitude that seems
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