Page 2486 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 6 August 2013
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We will support the bill today. We will keep a watching brief on it. I understand Mr Rattenbury has some amendments that the government has agreed to, so they will clearly get up. Hopefully, what we will have is better legislation for the Auditor-General after this discussion today. What we will not have is the appropriate funding. In a jurisdiction which only has one house of parliament, where officers like the auditor become far more important than they perhaps are in other jurisdictions, there still is the question of whether or not the audit office is getting the funding that it needs and deserves and, therefore, that the people of the ACT get the outcome from the audit office they should have and deserve.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.09): This bill is the first step of some important changes to the Auditor-General Act that will improve both the independence of the office and the scope of the audit function performed by the Auditor-General. The second step will, of course, be the officer of the Assembly amendment bill that I will present to the Assembly shortly. This bill contains a number of important reforms, all of which the Greens support. Many of these changes respond to the recommendations of the public accounts committee, and members will notice improvements that have been made to this bill from the one presented to the last Assembly. These changes pick up the Greens’ proposed amendments, and thank the Chief Minister for the productive way in which her office and the officials from the Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate have engaged on these issues.
I think the revised bill is significantly stronger and puts the Auditor-General in a better position to fully consider and respond to just about anything that may transpire. We now have a more holistic approach to ensure that the Auditor-General can really follow the money and ensure that public dollars are used as efficiently as possible. Importantly this version of the bill adopts changes to ensure there is a better process to afford non public sector entities procedural fairness.
Some other important points I would like to highlight are: the formal recognition of the independence of the Auditor-General and the Auditor-General’s staff; the clarified process for the independent audit of the Auditor-General, including a greater role for the public accounts committee in the appointment and conduct of the audit; and a more formal arrangement for the development and publication of the prospective performance audit program. Members know there is a process in place and that the Auditor-General already publishes her performance audit program on the audit website. The bill will make this a statutory process and clarify for the rest of the community how it works. Another important point is the greater discretion for the Auditor-General to conduct multiple and collaborative audits. And, finally, the bill also has a number of administrative tidy-ups to make the act clearer and more readable.
Another important point is that the government has essentially accepted the Greens’ proposal to ensure that the Auditor-General has the ultimate decision about whether to publicly release executive information. This is an important move forward from the current limitation that prevents the Auditor-General from releasing information that it would otherwise be in the public interest to release if the Chief Minister issues a certificate to prevent disclosure.
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