Page 3183 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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The City of Melbourne and Porto Alegre have done it; so we can do it. Madam Speaker, I put forward this motion as a positive way to improve our budget process and with it our government for all of Canberra.
MR BARR (Kurrajong—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development and Minister for Tourism and Major Events) (10.16): I thank Ms Le Couteur for bringing this motion forward this morning. I move the amendment to the motion circulated in my name:
Omit paragraph (4), substitute:
“(4) notes that the Government will:
(a) as part of its Budget Review to ‘improve community input’, conduct a participatory budgeting pilot no later than the 2019-20 Budget cycle, which:
(i) asks citizens to consider and make clear recommendations on how a discretionary portion of the City Services budget could be allocated to best reflect community priorities;
(ii) is designed by an advisory group with relevant expertise in deliberative democracy processes, including practitioners, academics and the community sector, to be convened by the Government;
(iii) is informed by the set of principles developed by ACTCOSS and CAPAD to ensure that deliberative mechanisms are trialled in a robust, respectful and informed way; and
(iv) uses a randomly selected citizen panel as a representative cross-section of the Canberra community and provides the panel with all relevant information;
(b) commit to transparently considering and publicly responding to the pilot panel’s recommendations; and
(c) commission and make public an independent post-implementation analysis of the pilot, identifying which components of the Budget and budget process would benefit from greater community input and possible models for future participatory budgeting processes in the ACT.”.
The government recently handed down a budget that will help deliver a better Canberra. It is one that delivers better schools, better health care where you need it, investment in community services, more investment in municipal services and support for the most vulnerable Canberrans.
As part of the process for developing the budget, the government established a dedicated consultation web page on the your say website which invited Canberrans to complete either a short or a detailed survey on their priorities and to provide a detailed submission outlining their views. This is something we have done in different forms for a number of years now, inviting the community to tell us what matters to them when it comes to how the territory’s budget is allocated.
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