Page 2426 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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round of community cabinet meetings where we take time out on a Saturday morning to meet Canberrans in different parts of our city to discuss local issues.
The government is aware of the importance of harnessing the capabilities of new technology to deliver improved access to government information and decision making. The cabinet will, in the next month, hold a virtual community cabinet where all ministers will be available to answer questions and respond to issues on Twitter. If this is successful, we will look at other online mechanisms to promote direct engagement with the community.
We will also complete the renewal of our community engagement manual in the next month. The manual includes many useful tools, techniques and checklists to support effective management for all government agencies. The revision of this manual follows through on our close engagement with the community in 2010 on how it wished to be consulted.
Thank you, members, for the opportunity to outline the government’s ideas in improving transparency in government processes and to encourage participation by the community in the everyday business of government. I am excited at the opportunities before us as we implement the steps I have outlined here today and as we continue to identify new ways of promoting openness and transparency in government. The initiatives I have outlined are all about bringing a closer partnership between my government and the citizens of Canberra. This partnership will be an essential feature of my government and I hope that Canberrans will welcome the ever-increasing opportunity they will find to participate in the government of this place. I present the following paper:
Open government—Ministerial statement, 23 June 2011.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (3.42), by leave: Not having had a chance to read the report, I will not go into the detail too much.
Madam Assistant Speaker, if you are going to talk about openness and transparency, again you have to judge the actions as much as the words. I think that it is time we put the challenge out. Instead of saying, “We’ll put some stuff that’s already released on a website and we’ll give some briefings in terms of what happened in cabinet,” let us look at what the government has suppressed over the last few years. There is now an opportunity for the Chief Minister to do things differently, to do things genuinely differently.
We can look at things like the Costello review, which remains suppressed. We can look at the bullying review, which remains suppressed. We remember all the documents that were suppressed and blanked out in relation to the Tuggeranong power station. We have seen the ongoing attempts of the Flynn community to get access to documents in relation to why their school community had its heart ripped out and why their school was closed. We have seen, indeed, the report into Enlighten just recently.
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