Page 2435 - Week 06 - Thursday, 23 June 2011
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And then, Madam Chief Minister, let us go back and look at all the documents that the previous government used to table and that your government chooses not to—or where your government modifies or deletes information to make them near irrelevant. I go back to the health statistics. For years Liberal health ministers tabled, on or about the 21st of each and every month, the health updates with the numbers in them. They were here for discussion. We were not afraid; we tabled them. Your government stopped that. If you want to be known as a Chief Minister who insists on openness and accountability and as a Chief Minister who is running an open government, bring back the monthly reports on the health stats. Bring them back. Enhance them. Put more in them, if you are fair dinkum. But I do not think you are. They are cheap words. Prove it. I say, “Prove it.”
The quarterly capital works report stopped for about three or four years under a government in which you sat in the cabinet, Chief Minister. It stopped because we know of the failures in the delivery of capital works. The report that is currently being put out has less information than it used to. If you are serious, Chief Minister, reinstate the pieces of information that have been deleted from the capital works report that you table and go back to the expanded version—and be a little bit brave: go even further.
I have to say that I have heard it all before. I think I can say that. I go back to another speech from Jon Stanhope, on 14 March 2001. He was going to insist on a government being fair, open and responsible. He said:
These are part of Labor’s core values—fairness, openness … responsibility. And they are the qualities that will characterise the Stanhope Labor government …
Well, they did not. They did not, because we hid reports that should have been made public. Significant reports that detail how things were going to change are still hidden by this government.
You can have a brave government, Chief Minister. You can have a government that changes things. You can make those reports available now as a good start to achieving openness in government. (Time expired.)
Question resolved in the affirmative.
Towards a Diversionary Framework for the ACT—interim response
Ministerial statement
MS BURCH (Brindabella—Minister for Community Services, Minister for the Arts, Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Women and Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs) (4.13), by leave: I table the following papers:
Towards a Diversionary Framework for the ACT Discussion Paper—
Interim response to the consultation report—Ministerial statement, 23 June 2011.
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