Page 2297 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 23 June 2010
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I just want to read out one of the quotes from Dr Ziller when she was talking about the process of consultation. During the hearings we heard about the number of meetings which were held and she very much emphasised that it is not actually about the quantity of meetings or the quantity of consultation; it is about the quality and how you engage with the community. This is what she stated:
It is not about the number, it is about the quality of the process. If you hold 700 meetings at which you tell people what is going to happen, it is not highly consultative. I do not know what happened. If you hold 700 meetings and the people who come to those meetings cannot get a record of their contribution then it is not a transparent process. Even if you hold 700 meetings, it is not the same as properly structured research. What happens is that the people who go to consultation meetings are the people who go to consultation meetings. The people who are uncomfortable in consultation meetings, public meetings, where lots of people are excited and shouting and whatever, do not get heard.
I think that is important to remember in the consultation processes that are undertaken.
As Ms Hunter has already said, there were a number of submissions to the committee about the Education Amendment Bill and why there were different views about what the period of consultation should be. Consistently, members of the community said they noted the need to accommodate the full-time obligations of busy parents who usually act in a volunteer capacity to support their school communities.
Many of the submissions to the inquiry highlighted the enormous amount of time spent in having to put research into writing submissions into the process with Towards 2020, and they very much noted that you do need that added consultation time to allow that process to be undertaken, which is why the 12-month period has been put into the amendments.
Again, I want to refer to a quote from Dr Alison Ziller about social impact assessment and how the process for community consultation is important:
The iron law of consulting is that never is enough consultation done and after you have letterboxed every street and house, most of them did not get it. However, there are two ways to ameliorate that. People feel very upset about it, and I understand why that is. There are two ways around that. One is that what you did is really transparent. Nowadays, people put things on the website, it stays there for a minute and a half and it is not there any more. So it is available, you can track it, you can see that they said they did this and they did that. The second is you do not have very short time periods for comment and you do not try and put a massive change through in a very short period of time. All of those things will fester the idea that we were not consulted, whether or not we were.
I think that is really important, looking at the consultation time period. Again, Dr Ziller talked about that clear understanding of communities wider than just the school community being impacted by these sorts of decisions and why having social impacts included is such an important thing. I think this is one of the really important amendments that Ms Hunter has made, recognising this and having this agreed to. I think it is a real step forward for the consultation process around these sorts of decisions in the ACT, and I think Ms Hunter should be commended for putting this in.
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