Page 1302 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 2012
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to the way we do business. In that context how does the latest community newsletter to Canberra households fit in with that philosophy, and are there any precedents for such a newsletter?
MS GALLAGHER: I thank Mr Hargreaves for the question very much. In the past week most Canberrans will have received a copy of the “Our city, our community” newsletter. This is the eighth edition of the newsletter, which provides Canberrans with a summary of important projects and initiatives as well as about new obligations, changes in legislation, and entitlements.
In part of the “time to talk” consultation process that we went through, we engaged with many thousands of Canberrans to get their view on the future of the city. The engagement took many forms, through face-to-face forums, workshops, surveys, online and random telephone calls. Through that process Canberrans made it very clear that they wanted to engage more closely with government; they wanted to hear more about what the government was doing.
I did make some commitments, when I became Chief Minister, to make the ACT government the most open in the nation, and we are living up to that plan with all of the changes we have put in place. We have an open government website. We release weekly summaries of cabinet deliberations. We are providing, and indeed the Assembly will debate, new freedom of information laws. We have got the freedom of information website, which people are finding more information out about. We have had the new Twitter cabinet meetings as well, which have been very successful, and indeed we will be having more of those into the future.
We have also taken the default position that all background reports presented to the government should be for public access and to make all public submissions gathered through those consultation processes public as well. My view is that if we have information that is fit for dissemination at the right time it should be made available to everybody. The time to talk consultation process, the biggest since self-government, had many positive outcomes.
In relation to the newsletter “Our city, our community”, it is an important and more traditional way of updating Canberrans on the things we do as a government. I think governments are criticised for not explaining what work they are doing, how they are investing, what legislation they are making and how they are governing, and this newsletter is an important tool to get information out.
The newsletter was scrutinised by the independent campaign advertising reviewer, Derek Volker, and met the requirements of the campaign advertising review act. In his assessment of the newsletter Mr Volker made reference to a random survey of 1,000 Canberrans conducted after the release of the 2011 community newsletter and he noted that 58 per cent of those surveyed expressed a preference to receive information from the government by newsletter. That percentage far outstripped the percentage referring to any other means, including radio, TV or online communication. In fact, 74 per cent of those surveyed said they would like to receive a newsletter more than once a year and just over half said they would appreciate a quarterly newsletter. At this
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