Page 2702 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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I would repeat my thanks to Tu Pham for exemplary leadership of the ACT audit office over those last seven years. Again, there was a recommendation, 193:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government examine options to ensure greater staff retention at the Office of the Auditor-General.
The government’s response simply was:
Agreed.
So we look forward to what those strategies might be.
I would commend the acting Auditor-General, Bernie Sheville, for the way in which he has managed the office in the interregnum and commend all of the staff of the ACT office for their dedicated work on behalf of our community.
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (5.37): I want to talk very briefly on this subject. Firstly, as I am sure everybody here in the Assembly would agree, the Auditor-General is an important and, need I say it, vital part of our democracy in the ACT and in fact everywhere. All Western democracies have auditors-general. Ours does financial auditing and performance auditing. This is particularly useful because we are a very small Assembly. We do not have an upper house. We have limited resources to do our own, in effect, auditing of the government. So I think there has been tripartisan agreement that the Auditor-General is important.
Unfortunately, however, there has not yet been agreement that the Auditor-General is important enough that the position should receive more funding. I note recommendation 194 of the estimates committee, which says:
The Committee recommends that the ACT Government provides a funding path which will allow the number of performance audits to be increased by two per year over the next five years.
The government has said:
Agreed in principle.
The Government will consider options for increasing capacity for performance audits in future budget development processes, in line with Government priorities and resource allocation.
That is all very well but it would be good to actually see the money.
I note this is something that the public accounts committee has been concerned about for a number of years and has recommended in the most recent year a funding increase along the lines of the estimates committee, with the PAC forming in fact the majority of the estimates committee. So the alignment is quite strong.
The other recommendation of the estimates committee concerning the Auditor-General was “examine options to ensure greater staff retention at the Office of the
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