Page 3670 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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services to the community and to plan and deliver these services in an accountable and financially constrained fashion? Increasing taxes and charges and not tackling the challenge of management and the financial structure is ignoring the problem. All of these are damning problems.
It is unfair to ACT taxpayers that the government should continue to increase taxes at a time when we do not know how or where the money is being spent, and there is no effective ministerial leadership of the Territory and Municipal Services portfolio. There is a lack of financial transparency, a lack of leadership, a lack of strategic direction and a failure to make promised administrative savings. Political influence has led to the department not delivering core business. Political expediency has been more important than financial control. It is a “spend at all costs” mentality.
The review has made some important recommendations and posed some questions for the government. But this government has a record of secrecy surrounding this report. This report did not come to the Assembly until last week, some eight months after it was published. Appendix A of the report remains a mystery because it was excluded from the document tabled in the Assembly. This raises further questions as to what the government has to hide. Appendix A detailed the review methodology and how different activities of the department are evaluated. The Chief Minister was not even here to read the tabling speech; who knows what the justification for that would be had he actually read his speech. Again, in the words of the review, “issues do not appear to have been fully resolved to leave a smoothly functioning single department”.
The government must look at the report and implement changes to management structures, improve financial reporting and discipline, and restructure the department and the government to ensure that TAMS can focus on its core service delivery priorities. It is important that this Assembly is given the opportunity to scrutinise the government’s progress in implementing these recommendations to resolve these issues, and I look forward to the minister providing a report.
Mr Stanhope has two key challenges. The first one, as I have already mentioned, is: how is he going to respond to this report? How is he actually going to fix the Department of Territory and Municipal Services? How is he going to implement the 22 recommendations? The second challenge is: what is he going to do about Mr Hargreaves? Mr Hargreaves has had problem after problem, yet it seems that the right faction and Mr Barr are way too strong and overshadow that of the Chief Minister. It is time for the Chief Minister to show some leadership and some strength, to stare down the ALP right faction and to sack Mr Hargreaves. I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (11.48): I understand that the government will be moving some amendments to this motion, circulated in Mr Barr’s name. I will just say that the Greens will be supporting those amendments. The first amendment is to omit paragraph (1)(b), which includes the words, “gives a scathing assessment of the department”. I have only been here nearly a year, but I have to say that every question time I hear a scathing assessment of the Liberal Party or the Labor Party. This review could hardly be described as a scathing assessment, whatever we might describe it as. Paragraph (c) does not appear to be supported by this report. Paragraph (2) is also not
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