Page 3419 - Week 08 - Thursday, 23 August 2012
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much quicker. So they are feeling it. I think statements that demonstrate that politicians like the Chief Minister are out of touch are unfortunate. I think they demonstrate where this government are at when it comes to cost of living. They will pay cost of living lip-service but every action they have taken has put costs up—and not just by a little bit, not just with inflation, not just in the expected way that we might see costs go up over time, but far higher and far quicker.
People would be seeing that and, when they hear these statements from the Chief Minister, I think that they would get a sense that this government does not get it. After 11 years, I think it does not. This government is not interested in addressing costs of living. It seems it is only ever interested in increasing taxes and charges, and we see that all the time.
I have a number of other things I would like to look at. I will briefly talk about the government office block and the walking away from that. I think a lot of taxpayers’ money has been wasted on that. We should not pretend that these things do not matter. When you go to the community with fabricated figures, a fabricated case, and then you realise that actually it is not a good idea, having spent millions of dollars, that matters. Those millions of dollars are another example of why Canberrans face these cost pressures.
This government office block is a credibility killer for this government, because this Chief Minister and this Treasurer said it was necessary and that it would save us millions of dollars—$34 million a year. They were saying it and they knew it not to be true, because if they thought it was true, they would have done it. They absolutely would have done it. So they were being completely dishonest and hypocritical with the community, and I think that should be condemned. (Time expired.)
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (4.27): I want to start by making some brief comments in relation to accountability indicators used for directorates across the government.
I note that the government have agreed to the recommendation in the estimates report in regard to ensuring that accountability and strategic indicators are relevant and useful. This was something that we spent a bit of time on in the estimates process. On quite a number of occasions we asked questions of the various directorates about the different strategic and accountability indicators and they had to concede that they were not terribly useful at times and really offered no measure of accountability in some cases in a way that you would have expected for directorates’ performance.
We have often talked about taking a broader look at how we measure our performance and have praised the measuring our progress website, which I think we should utilise more. We could incorporate those types of measurements into our strategic and accountability measures.
Also, in relation to across-government projects, in spite of the repeated discussion about the role of the Chief Minister and Cabinet Directorate in coordinating across-government initiatives such as sustainability policy alignment, as listed in the statement of purpose, there is still limited evidence about exactly what is happening.
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