Page 1570 - Week 04 - Thursday, 25 March 2010
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Open, honest and accountable government is a feature of all Australian jurisdictions and in a small jurisdiction like the ACT, with a small parliament and minority government, there is, quite properly, significant scrutiny of government decisions and plentiful opportunities and mechanisms for ministers to be held to account for their actions. And the government is supportive of all of those processes. That does not mean that we also should support every attempt to break open and invite interference in all decision making.
While I would defend the Assembly’s right to hold this or any government to account for the decisions it takes, non-executive members are not part of the government. That is not the way governments based on Westminster operate. The government must be allowed to govern. It must be allowed to take decisions. Voters will judge ultimately whether those decisions were the best decisions to be taken in the circumstances. That is not the task of non-executive members.
There are genuine and compelling public interest reasons why some—not all, but some—of the government’s processes must be conducted behind closed doors. These are perhaps most evident in the areas of cabinet decision making, commercial negotiations, industrial negotiations, legal matters and intergovernmental relations. To operate otherwise would be to render good government simply impossible. Confusing the roles of the arms of government, blurring the boundaries, eroding the superstructure of our system of governance has both legal and practical ramifications.
Madam Assistant Speaker, openness and accountability is not limited to the relationship between the government and the Assembly. Governments also have a duty to be open and accountable to the people, to the community. You would be aware that enhancing citizen engagement and participation were identified in the 2008 citizen-centred governance paper and the updated Canberra plan as a means of supporting transparent, accountable and responsive government.
Flowing from that paper, the Chief Minister’s Department has been reviewing community engagement protocols and processes. Work to date has included improving the community engagement website, updating the community engagement manual, better and more targeted training of our community engagement officers, the use of new technologies in our community consultations and a very popular new weekend format for community cabinet.
In the 2008-09 budget we allocated $250,000 to the Chief Minister’s Department to strengthen the government’s focus on accountability and performance. As a first step, the department commissioned the Allen Consulting Group to prepare a report examining the ACT’s existing performance and accountability framework, presenting the key principles for better practice and outlining a possible principles-based framework for the ACT.
The Allen Consulting Group report was released on the Chief Minister’s Department website in May last year. This report informed further consultation across government as we refined an ACT-specific framework and detailed implementation plan. This across-government consultation phase is now complete. The department is now developing a policy paper for government consideration.
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