Page 3681 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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It does that. It is scathing. It might be couched in very gentlemanly terms and very accounting-like terms, but it is scathing of the things that need to occur. And these are things that, in the main, need to occur within three to nine months of the report being tabled, which is this month.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (12.24): I am getting up to support the amendments to this motion that have been moved by the government. That was acknowledged by my colleague Ms Le Couteur earlier on.
One of the things with this report that I think I mentioned publicly late last week was that there were some processes and change management processes that did not go on just after 2003. We had the functional review that led to many changes across government. One of those was that many different business units were brought into what became this very large Department of Territory and Municipal Services. That was things like ACTION buses no longer being a separate statutory authority but becoming a business unit within the new Department of TAMS.
I believe that what happened in that process was that there was not an ongoing change management process, a look at how the structure would work and a look at the governance arrangements and the financial accountability that needed to be put in place when you were pulling together so many different services and business units under one umbrella, one department.
The idea of this was to produce cost savings to some degree. That did not happen. But what did happen along the way was that the department commissioned this report, this strategic budget review, which was a good step along the way, to be able to take stock, to look at how they might be able to improve performance, to look at how they might be able to restructure the organisation to deliver the services, and also, obviously, to look at the budgetary issues.
I think it is undeniable—even the Liberals would be hard pressed to deny it—that there has been a rise in costs in the last few years. There has been a rise in the cost of water. There has been a rise in the cost of goods and services. This has obviously impacted on a department that provides so many front-line services to the ACT community.
It is TAMS that you ring about parks. You ring them about playgrounds, roads, rubbish, public transport, footpaths, cycle paths and libraries. If there is a problem with your street trees, you call TAMS. There are so many services that this department delivers to people across Canberra every single day. And they have been very good at responding to those calls.
I am not going to stand here and criticise a department that has been responsive to the calls from people who want someone to come and check a nest in the backyard to see if it is a European wasp’s nest and there needs to be action. There are elderly people who have had some issues around footpaths and walking in their neighbourhoods who call TAMS to come and assist them. I am not going to criticise there.
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