Page 2431 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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attention to Treasury, particularly with the impact of the GFC at the time. She then said that that was sexist. This is a minister who says: “No, it’s open and accountable. We’re open for scrutiny. We don’t mind.” But if you make a complaint or put some scrutiny towards her, instead of saying, “Yes, I’m open to that,” her response is, “You’re being sexist.” Does that sound like someone who is willing to run and to lead an open and accountable government?
What about the promise for a secure adult mental health facility? Where has that gone? Is that a broken promise? What happened with that? We have heard about the schools promise—that there would be no schools closed in her life in government—and she just ignored that. I think that when it comes to the point of honesty, when it comes to this government being open and accountable, we saw it with the last quarterly health report, where Katy Gallagher was called on by this chamber to provide a more accurate and honest summation of public health services. This Assembly voted on that because she had been so misleading in her summation of the statistics arising out of our health system. It is very difficult for anybody in this place or for the public to take anything seriously when she says that she is going to be running an open and accountable government simply because she is going to have a website.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (3.58): I welcome this paper, because clearly the Greens have always been in favour of open government. What Ms Gallagher is talking about—transparency, participation and public collaboration—are things which the Greens are strongly in favour of. However, I am not totally going to be saying positive words here. On page 3 Ms Gallagher mentions three things which have informed this. Maybe I am showing a bit of ego here, but I am really surprised.
In March this year, this Assembly passed a motion on Government 2.0. I do note that the Labor Party voted against it; I will admit that. But a lot of the things that are talked about in this are things that were talked about in the Government 2.0 motion and, more to the point, it was passed by the Assembly. So the government was given instructions by the Assembly that we wanted to see a more open government and we wanted to see the government use Web 2.0 tools to achieve that. I think that it would behove the government to realise that the Labor Party is one of three parties here and the Assembly does matter. And taking into account what the Assembly said on this would be, at the least, courteous.
Going to two of the actual details—and had the Chief Minister distributed this earlier, I would have had a more detailed response—she is intending to produce yet another website, an open government website, as a single gateway to access government information and provide a greater opportunity for public involvement in the governance of the ACT.
This leads to the obvious question: what of the current ACT government websites? Are they all going to be part of this website? How is the information management framework going to work? Or will this make it even harder to find things because you will not know this came out from TAMS and therefore it will be on the TAMS website or the open government website? She said the website will be operational in three months time. I sincerely hope that somebody is actually doing some work on the
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