Page 1651 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 May 2013
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for the government to change their behaviour and actually respond to the community’s call for accountability.
If we needed further evidence of a lack of accountability, we only need to look at what happened a few days ago. A Canberra Times article titled “ACTEW executive pay report kept secret” states:
Canberra water company ACTEW is seeking to block the release of an independent review into managing director Mark Sullivan’s pay, just weeks after fellow utility company ActewAGL refused to disclose the wages of its top executives.
The Canberra Times requested a copy of correspondence between ACTEW and one of its … shareholders, Chief Minister Katy Gallagher, from the Chief Minister’s office, but a number of documents were withheld after objections raised by individuals including Mr Sullivan and former ACTEW chairman John Mackay.
What the ACTEW scandal has illustrated is a pattern of behaviour by the ACT Labor government in failing to be open and accountable. Only last year this government was embroiled in the emergency department data doctoring scandal. The Auditor-General found, in regard to the Health Directorate:
There is a lack of governance and administrative accountability for this system …
And furthermore:
There was also a lack of … monitoring, review and assurance processes over the publicly reported Emergency Department performance information are not consistent with the apparent importance of the performance information …
Once again this illustrates that there is wide public interest in this information but the government fails to be accountable and transparent.
Let us look at what, of course, that data scandal was about. The data scandal was about hiding the facts. It was about hiding the truth from the community. Instead of being open, accountable and transparent about the fact that emergency departments were not doing very well—in fact they were doing about as bad as you could possibly expect them to do, the worst in the country—there was a culture within this government of covering it up. That is what we saw with the data doctoring scandal—a culture of cover-up that comes right from the top of government. Of course at estimates we heard the Chief Minister say:
… back in April anomalies in emergency department data were brought to my attention. Since that time, I have provided all the information that I can on this to the community.
Of course, that was not true. The Chief Minister had not revealed all of the facts of the matter. She had not revealed the close relationship she had with the data manipulator herself, only seeing that exposed in media commentary down the track. We have seen
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