Page 2420 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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The 2010-11 directions largely replicate the 2007-2010 Annual report directions. However, some minor and technical amendments have been made, including changes that both reflect the new administrative arrangements and provide proper accountability for those agency-based operations that were in place up to 17 May. Of some particular note are the amendments which have been made to sections A.10, triple bottom line report, and C.21, ecologically sustainable development, following recommendations from the relevant policy areas in directorates to improve the usefulness of the information reported.
In short, the amendments align the common reporting elements across these sections. The amendments were provided to the Standing Committee on Public Accounts for consultation in accordance with section 8 of the Annual Reports (Government Agencies) Act 2004. The committee considered the proposed changes and advised on 15 June 2011 of its agreement with the changes to the directions.
The Annual report directions require responsible ministers to provide reports to the Speaker, who in turn is required under the act to provide them to members of the Legislative Assembly before the end of September. At this time, annual reports will be made publicly available. As there are no sitting days of the Legislative Assembly in the last seven days of September, reports will be presented to the Assembly on 18 October 2011 and all reports will include an audited financial statement and performance statements.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo), by leave: It is very pleasing to see that the Chief Minister’s Annual report directions are slowly being improved over time, but I confess I have to emphasise, unfortunately, the word “slowly”. The Greens believe that the Annual report directions are extremely important because they give us the framework for what data the Assembly, and indeed the ACT community, have to see what the government is doing and how the government is reporting.
There are two areas where the Greens are pushing very much for improvement: ESD, ecologically sustainable data, and triple bottom line data. With the ESD data, I have to say that there has been continual improvement over the last six-plus years, but there are still a lot of problems with consistency of the data collection and reporting. As you sift through annual reports, you go through seeing this being reported differently by different departments, or different directorates now. It is depressing that it has not all been resolved as yet. The Auditor-General in 2005 inquired into this and made recommendations for improvement, but not all of them have yet been implemented.
I note that the commissioner for the environment also looked into this in 2010. Her report, I understand, is still with the Chief Minister. It would be very informative if other members of the Assembly could see the commissioner for the environment’s report, particularly before next year, when I understand that there will be a major update of the Chief Minister’s Annual report directions.
The other area that I would like to mention is triple bottom line reporting. This is another issue which the Greens ensured was inserted into the parliamentary agreement. It has been very slow; we have watched the government grappling with this issue and
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