Page 4421 - Week 10 - Thursday, 23 September 2010
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As I think we all agreed yesterday, IT and ICT are very important in terms of government operations. In that context, I would particularly draw attention to that recommendation.
All 11 recommendations that the committee made, I believe, are important. It is possible that other members of the committee may want to comment on the report and highlight some other items. Before I conclude, I would like to thank my committee colleagues, Mr Smyth and Mr Hargreaves, and of course the Committee Office, Andrea Cullen in particular, without whose assistance this report would not exist. I commend the report to the Assembly. My colleagues may wish to also provide comment.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (11.35): I will start with the thankyous as well. I thank the chair and Mr Hargreaves for their efforts. Ms Burch was also on the committee for part of this time. I thank Andrea, Samara and Lydia for their support in helping us put the report together.
As was said, there are 11 recommendations. This report, as Ms Le Couteur has said, is very important particularly in terms of how we manage the finances of the territory. In fact, most of the departments did quite well. There were fewer qualified statements this year, but there were two in particular I want to mention, Housing ACT and TAMS. The report says:
… that ‘Housing ACT did not measure the results for two of its performance measures as required by the Financial Management Act 1996’.
… that ‘TAMS did not measure the result for one of its performance measures as required by the Financial Management Act 1996’.
Recommendation 1 reminds Housing and TAMS that they do have to carry out what is required. You could therefore say that, if they have not done what is required under the Financial Management Act, that of course is a breach of the Financial Management Act. We had issues yesterday over TAMS and ACTION and breaches of the Financial Management Act. We have had the assurance of the Chief Minister that they are working on this. But again we see that the act is not being honoured and that, I think, is a dreadful precedent.
There is a question about the quality of some of the performance measures. There is a quote in paragraph 2.14 of the report taken from the audit:
… many instances where the performance measures and associated targets provided little or no meaningful information about the performance of the reporting agency.
It is important that we get meaningful targets. We all receive so much information. Trying to wade through things that are meaningless is an inappropriate use of our time. Indeed, paragraph 2.18 states:
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