Page 3616 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 25 August 2009
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relation to the energy policy through a thorough and rigorous consultation process. The Chief Minister just mentioned in his speech that at the community engagement website there is a string of various consultations that have either closed or are ongoing at the present time.
There are a couple of points I want to make about that. Number one is that when we put in the agreement that we wanted the community engagement unit re-established in the Chief Minister’s Department, we also expected that the tools that they were using such as portals and websites would also move over; so in the future we would like to see that that website is easily accessible and is not necessarily accessed through a different department’s website.
Another note of caution is that it is important to run consultations. There are times when people do not feel consulted enough or they feel consulted out. It is always difficult to get that balance. It can be very difficult particularly for peak organisations representing a range of individuals or organisations when a series of consultations all are running at the same time.
At the moment we have a number of government plans that are all running out in a similar period. There is the mental health plan, the young people’s plan, the children’s plan and the list goes on and on. For some of the organisations at the peak level, this is an incredibly heavy workload for them to consult on with their members and the consumers about their member services and so forth and to be able to put a well-researched and considered submission into some of these processes.
I also sound a note of caution that about moving the community engagement unit to the Chief Minister’s Department. Part of it was to be able to look right across government at all those different plans that fall out of the social plan and the Canberra plan to ensure that they are put in place in a considered way and not, sort of, in a six-month period with a frenzy of activity around consultation.
All four Green MLAs have hosted public forums here at the Assembly since being elected. These forums on subjects ranging from the food we eat to the way we are buried have been well attended and brought community views and debate into the public arena. We have brought strong advocates from particular sides that have given debate together with members of the public who come along with their views or simply to listen to become better informed. One forum organised by Mr Rattenbury brought together the Canberra Airport Group and Curfew for Canberra.
While these two groups have very different positions on the issue of a curfew for Canberra, the debate still brought out many shared concerns. The forums have shown once again Canberrans’ eagerness to engage in all matters of public interest. Interestingly, the best-attended of our many forums so far was on the subject of death and burial, one that I believe that Mr Coe spent some time deriding us about. This is a subject that we might imagine the public would avoid discussion of, but it is clearly something that is of great importance to many people across Canberra. There were something like 80 to 100 people who turned up to that forum here at the Assembly.
A forum I held recently in which Dr Maartin Stapper discussed the important issue of who is in charge of producing and processing the food we eat. The forum was another
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