Page 3214 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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We then made a number of recommendations about IT. I am fairly confident that the government of the day will take these on because I think they are sensible.
Recommendation 7 is a recommendation that does not particularly relate, as I say, to this inquiry. It is a more general one and probably reflects PAC’s experience over nearly four years. I will be echoing some of the comments that my colleague Mr Smyth made with respect to the previous inquiry. Recommendation 7 basically recommends that all government directorates and agencies have effective practices and processes in place to review all the reports of the Auditor-General and access the relevance of the findings and recommendations to their agencies regardless of whether or not the agency was involved in the specific audit. Basically what we are saying here is that the Auditor-General actually says some quite sensible things and it behoves all of the government to have a look at them, even if they have not yet been subject to an audit on those issues.
We also talked about communication guidelines and about looking at the organisational culture.
Given the short amount of time we have before us for the remainder of this sitting period and the fact that many of these issues have been canvassed already this morning, I will not speak for much longer, except to very much echo the comments that Mr Hargreaves made about Dr Cullen. Without her hard work there is no possibility we could have got this report together in the very limited time frame we had. We all owe her a significant debt of gratitude.
I think that, all things considered, PAC did a very reasonable job in this report, and I do commend it, both to the Assembly and to the future public accounts committee who may wish to follow on this.
MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (4.30): Madam Deputy Speaker, I would like to again thank committee members for their contributions to this report. For the most part, there was a constructive dialogue, or “trialogue”, within the committee. For the most part it was okay and we were looking forward.
I must say that when I first approached it I thought it had all the hallmarks of an unnecessary witch-hunt. I felt, in fact, that the estimates committee had had quite a deal of time to examine the issue; had done so in a very forensic way; had received a quite extensive amount of forensic evidence, from the PwC report to the Auditor-General’s report; and had spent a goodly number of hours quizzing the Minister for Health, 60 per cent of which was done by members who are not members of the estimates committee but, obviously, had an interest to get as much out of it politically as they could. I approached this particular report with that in mind. I was not going to be a party to witch-hunts.
Most of the recommendations I did not have a problem with. I will not go through them all. People can read for themselves. Ms Le Couteur has indicated a couple of them. But there were three that I would like to comment on.
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