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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (2 December) . . Page.. 4240 ..

MS REILLY (continuing):

We also need to note that Fame is not an ACT-based company. Surely we do not let contracts for government business on the basis of who is known by people within the department. I think it is an outrageous criterion for selection that someone be known by the departmental officers. Obviously, anybody looking at a contract has to look at the track record of those who have put in to undertake the work. To say that just because they are known is a reason for selecting them and not going to open tender is worrying.

A further concern about this piecemeal approach is that the Chief Minister and Minister for Community Care has made a number of statements about the new directions being taken in Disability Services. In fact, there was a considerable response to the Standing Committee on Social Policy in relation to that. If Disability Services are to work better, improve their guidelines and information available to both consumers and the public and improve training and information for staff, one would expect an overall strategy about what is going to be done. But there appears to be no strategy or plan for what you are doing, because the company that was hired to provide the information for the guidelines and the future directions was given contracts in small parcels. Everybody was going forward in the dark to develop this brave new world for Disability Services. If, in fact, there was an overall strategy and if they knew where they were going and what was going to happen in relation to the development of the new guidelines and the new policy statements, then why was one contract not let in an open and competitive fashion? In the end it may have been won by Fame. Why was it done in this piecemeal way? There was no explanation for this.

It was done in small parcels either because they had no plan, which makes one wonder about what was going to be achieved and why we had a new program for Disability Services when we had no idea where we were going to end up, or as a means of deliberately avoiding giving reasons for having an open and competitive process. These questions were left unanswered at the end of the estimates process. Any estimates committee in the future has to consider how contracts and tendering processes are undertaken by agencies and ensure that there is no opportunity to deceive by splitting contracts into smaller parts so that there does not have to be an open tendering process. We need to ensure that when government money is being spent we know the purpose for which it is being spent. (Extension of time granted)

Questioning on the extent of homelessness in the ACT revealed that there appears to be no plan for the development and provision of community and social services in the ACT. In part, this is due to inadequate data on which to base decisions for the development of such a plan. This was commented on by me and by others when the budget was brought down in May and in the early examination of that budget through the estimates process. There appears to be very little data available on a broad range of areas within the ACT. You are left wondering how the Government decides on certain types of expenditure. For instance, you wonder how the Government decides how much money should be spent on constructing and purchasing housing if it does not know the extent of homelessness. How were decisions made to sell over 200 houses and units in the ACT in 1996-97 when we do not know the extent of homelessness? How are such decisions reached if we do not know the people we are providing services for?

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