Page 4709 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 31 October 2017
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know it exists. This is why my motion was about participatory budgeting. It is a proven method used successfully all over the world and in Australia.
In Porto Alegre, in Brazil, the city has been running a participatory budgeting process for nearly 30 years. Local residents attend public meetings where they make proposals and then vote to decide how municipal funding will be allocated. The city has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to capital projects using this approach since 1989. Research into the Porto Alegre process has found that this approach is strongly correlated with reduced poverty, improved access to water and sanitation, better housing affordability and reduced infant mortality rates.
In Australia we have experimented with this in the city of Geraldton. They have run two parliamentary participatory budgeting exercises, in 2013 and 2014, engaging with a community panel of around 30 residents to determine budget priorities. More recently the city of Melbourne ran a process to do a 10-year plan for the budget of the city of Melbourne, and that was very successful. These are just two examples of over 2,000 participatory budgeting exercises conducted worldwide.
I am very pleased that Canberra, as a progressive jurisdiction, will soon be undertaking its own participatory budgeting process, and I look forward to more community participation in the work of the government and our budget. I commend Ms Cody for her motion.
MS FITZHARRIS (Yerrabi—Minister for Health, Minister for Transport and City Services and Minister for Higher Education, Training and Research) (4.18): I thank Ms Cody very much for putting forward this matter of public importance. As has been noted, Canberrans are rightly very proud of their city. Canberra’s open spaces, shared infrastructure and valued services help to make our city one of the most livable in the world. It is also our community which makes the ACT unique. It is our values which shape how Canberra grows and which set the standards we strive for. Meeting those standards is a responsibility that the Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate is fully committed to.
Our community relies on TCCS services every day, be that in helping us get to school, work, study or leisure, protecting and maintaining our open spaces, or helping us learn and grow through our libraries. It is easy to look at what TCCS does and think of the tangible, visible, physical things like buses, books and roads, but really our services are about people. Every day TCCS does what it does so that we can make the lives of fellow Canberrans easier. That is a great responsibility and one we can only meet with the support of the community. We need their help to understand what is important to them, to shape the services that will continue to make Canberra one of the world’s most livable cities for decades to come. And of course we need to receive feedback from the community.
The fix my street service is an important tool for us in delivering the services the ACT community needs and deserves. It is a useful and meaningful resource for Canberrans. Fix my street provides a simple way for the community to speak to us directly about and point out things that need our attention, which not only helps us to know where we are needed but also demonstrates our commitment to working with
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