Page 2793 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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support and which I encourage the government to actively focus on. For this reason the Greens generally support the motion today. It has a priority on increasing activity levels which in turn will make us as a city healthier and happier.
I do, however, have a couple of reservations about the motion. Firstly, it does pick out five of the 52 strategic initiatives for mention and calls on the government to take action under them. They are listed in the motion as 1.5, 3.4, 7.6, 7.5 and 7.9. Certainly, when I looked at this I did have a conversation with Ms Porter about why she had specifically focused on those. Perhaps the corollary question is: what about the remaining 47 strategic initiatives? The Greens support the remaining 47, as I am sure Ms Porter does, and we would all be encouraging the government to work on them as well.
As I said, I have had a conversation with Ms Porter about that. I now have a better understanding of why she has chosen those specific areas to focus on. I guess that speaks to the fact that we will be supporting the motion in that broad sense because of that conversation.
The second reservation I have about the strategic plan more generally, and therefore the motion picking up on it, is the lack of measurable indicators of progress. I should start by saying that the Greens want to be able to see how active the Canberra community is and how much more active the government is aiming for us to be. It comes back to being a healthier and happier community.
If I take strategic initiative 1.5 as an example, and one that Ms Porter has highlighted in her motion, the strategic indicator is to ensure programs support population groups including disability, youth, Indigenous, women, ageing and cultural groups. The success indicator is that programs are inclusive and engage identified groups. A lot of good work has been done throughout the document in terms of having a strategic initiative. It identifies who is specifically responsible for that strategic initiative and there are success indicators to provide some measure.
But the problem I have is that the strategic indicators, I guess by their nature, are too vague to be measurable and reportable on. The example indicator 1.5, which I spoke of, talks about inclusiveness, which is a welcome sentiment but it is not measurable. It is important that these strategic indicators are measurable, because having a measurable indicator ensures that we are able to measure our progress against the targets, where we need to do more and where we need to focus our energy and resources.
So to that end I will be proposing an amendment today. I would call it a friendly addition to Ms Porter’s motion. If I can continue to use indicator 1.5 as an example, what I would have liked to have seen, for example, were targets that say that by the year 2016, the midway point of the 10-year plan, 75 per cent of our youth are participating in regular sport and recreation. I do not want to second-guess the work that the group putting the paper together have done. I simply try to illustrate what I have in mind.
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