Page 3184 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 23 August 2017
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There were 368 responses to the short survey. The top service area identified by respondents was sport and recreation facilities, followed by health and health infrastructure and education. I will confess that a somewhat surprising number one priority for the ACT community was the development of a new ice sports facility, with almost a quarter of all of the responses putting that first. This shows clearly the passion but, I would say, more importantly, the organisational skills of our ice sports community more than anything.
The government received 72 detailed submissions and 57 responses to the detailed survey. The detailed survey and submissions covered a range of issues including the arts and entertainment, community services, disability, education, public infrastructure and transport, sport—ice rinks, for example—sustainability as well as matters relating to the broader issue of the territory’s finances.
Individual agencies reviewed these submissions as part of the process for developing proposals for the 2017-18 budget. Each minister delivered an individual briefing to cabinet on the feedback provided in their portfolio areas. This highlights that the government values community input in the budget process and has long sought to incorporate this by seeking public submissions.
One thing I am very conscious of, however, is the importance of hearing not just from organised stakeholder and community groups with a particular agenda to push. We know that there are hundreds of thousands of Canberrans who are affected by decisions we take in the budget process but who do not participate in traditional consultation processes. This can be because of time constraints or the nature of those processes.
As I have stated earlier this year and on numerous occasions, I want more Canberrans to be able to participate in decisions that shape the future of the city. That is why we announced the ACT’s first citizens jury yesterday. We will be asking a representative group of Canberrans to come together to deliberate on the CTP issue and make recommendations for reform.
We hope that there will be many lessons but also opportunities that will come out of the community engagement and participation exercise through this pilot project. We will seek to apply those learnings across government, looking at how the community can be more directly involved in determining priorities and weighing up competing options for budget spending in practical areas like city services. We will get this work underway once the first pilot citizens jury has completed its deliberations and we can assess how to best feed those community inputs into the wider government process.
As I have said before, the way the government consults the Canberra community needs to change. We will be putting in place a range of mechanisms to change that. It is already changing for the better and it will better reflect the views and goals of the entire Canberra community, not just the organised stakeholder groups.
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