Page 1323 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 2012
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It is vital that the Social Compact is championed to ensure that it remains relevant and useful to the parties involved and supports positive and productive ways of working together for the benefit of the Canberra community.
It has become clear to me that the social compact has not always been successfully embedded in practice and in the relationship between the government and the community sector and that in some cases it has lost its relevance and usefulness to some in the hardworking community sector that the ACT Greens respect and value highly.
The social compact was to be used in four main ways: firstly, to build common understanding and improve dialogue; secondly, as a guide to the way communication and processes are managed by each sector and to behaviour in the relationship; thirdly, as a means of drawing attention to and resolving problems in the relationship; and also as a basis for evaluating and improving how the relationship is working.
Let me now present some of the findings of a survey recently undertaken by the ACT Council of Social Service—ACTCOSS—on this document. The introduction of the social compact survey 2011 states:
Previous work undertaken by ACTCOSS has shown that the Social Compact has had a disappointingly low impact on the ground in promoting an equal and respectful relationship between Government and the community sector. In 2007 the key reasons for this were identified ... as a lack of knowledge about the Social Compact, and a lack of means to address perceived breaches of the Social Compact.
The most current work from August of this year paints a similar picture. Of the 120 public service staff who participated, nearly half of them were not even aware of the social compact. While 42 per cent of community sector respondents were aware of it, only one-third of them found it a useful tool for building relationships and even less found it useful as an effective tool in ongoing relationships.
I do understand that the ACT Joint Community Government Reference Group will be considering how best to respond to this information in coming months. I pay my respects to that group. As a previous chair, it was our role under our terms of reference to ensure that the compact was promoted and got out there. But obviously there are some ongoing issues that truly do need to be addressed.
I believe that the social compact has not been championed and that we need to create the right authorising environment to reinvigorate the principles of the social compact that I presented just a moment ago in my speech.
Let me move now to what can only be described as a flawed process and one that has negatively affected not only the many community organisations involved but has also created great consternation. I think it will highlight why it is important that there be more than just a mediation process in the compact. There needs to be some sort of way of ensuring that breaching the compact has some sort of consequence.
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