Page 2710 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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how many reports we have written. I am sure this would be useful for all of us. At present there is no detailed written information except the line items in the budget papers. It would be clarified if key indicators were brought across from major government plans and reported against. This would save a lot of time and effort and lead to a lot fewer questions on notice in the estimates process.
In the estimates hearings we heard that the government is still not sure whether the new triple bottom line assessment tool will be ready for next year’s budget. This is frustrating, because it means that the government will have spent the whole of this Assembly term developing a framework for triple bottom line reporting and accounting, but it still will not actually be able to use it as a framework for deciding key budget expenditure.
I presume that this is the same for climate change impact analysis and poverty impact analysis—that they will be incorporated into the new framework. Right now, in 2011, we should be making decisions—expenditure decisions and major policy decisions—based on what the climate impacts are going to be and whether these new programs will disadvantage low income people. But we do not have the tools to do it. Again I fear that the government are trying to create their own tools and frameworks to assess these impacts, but other jurisdictions have already been there and done that. We need to look afar for our solutions and then use our local knowledge and expertise to apply these tools locally. I look forward to seeing the draft framework very soon and hope that next year’s budget will indeed be something different and worth waiting for.
Last year the government released its next update of “Measuring our progress”, the progress report on People, place, prosperity. It was disappointing to see that the key indicators from this have not been translated into budget papers. This government is very good at spending money on expensive consultancy reports, but it has not managed to translate this into a real action. Where are the indicators that we are meeting our climate change targets, affordable housing targets or the Canberra plan targets?
But enough on that; I am being a bit of a broken record. I will move on to the infrastructure plan, which I understand will be coming out soon. I am very pleased about that and I hope that there will soon be a greater priority placed on this in terms of giving the plan more teeth in terms of implementing sustainable infrastructure planning, procurement and development. This means not only identifying the needs of Canberrans in the next 10 years but looking to the future and ensuring that our infrastructure will still be able to meet our needs in 50 years. We do not want to be constantly rebuilding as population grows and the impacts of peak oil and climate change start hitting Canberra more directly.
It will be interesting to see how the new government information officer changes how the ACT government deals with information. Certainly improvement is needed. I note Ms Gallagher’s recent and welcome statements on open government and I will be looking at the various comments about it. Generally, of course, whilst they are supportive, as we all are, they are all amazed at the idea of holding cabinet by Twitter. We are really getting to a serious reduction of political discourse when we are holding it in 140-character bursts. And taking three months to build a brilliant open government website is either too long, because it will just link to the existing sites, or
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