Page 2483 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
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reined in in areas such as this where there has been, in my view, great opportunity to reduce the cost to the taxpayer.
The description under the output is that they provide an information and protocol service for the Chief Minister, delivery of the key ACT government community events and whole-of-government communication and support, including whole-of-government emergency responses. It is well and good to have the emergency response side, but I question whether all the other functions that seem to be welded into this agency are really appropriate and absolutely necessary in a time when we are being told that the people of Canberra have got to pay massive increases in their taxes and charges. Many people will not be able to afford those increases. I know property taxes can be attached to the property. The view will be: if the people end up having to sell up, the government will get its cut. But I fail to see, when we have got that level of pressure on those on fixed incomes, retired folks or young families trying to manage their budgets with all these new charges, outlays of this magnitude as part of this process of promoting the government.
I have also raised in the past concerns about industrial relations—I know that is handled by another minister—and how that area of policy is handled by the territory government. Embarking on politically inspired court actions, as we have seen federally, costing, I think, $100,000, and the skill in negotiating on the industrial relations front, which we will touch on further, I am sure, have certainly left me with a lack of confidence in the capacity which we have to undertake those areas of activity. I will finish on that remark and leave it to other members to expand the comment.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.04): There are some elements of the Chief Minister’s Department that I wish to dwell on in my comments. Particularly, I wish to touch on the areas of expenditure on the environment. Mr Mulcahy touched on them earlier when he spoke about the rearrangement of the environment portfolio out of the Chief Minister’s Department into the Department of Territory and Municipal Services. This will be the third change for some parts of that area in just over a year. I think it was on 1 July 2005 that Environment ACT came formally into Chief Minister’s and brought with it those areas of land management that used to be covered by ACT Forests. Now they are out on their pink little shell-like and back into what used to be urban services.
This is enormously disruptive. It is disruptive for the staff. The staff are going through a big number of reorganisations. Some of the reorganisations, on the surface, on the face of it, if they were carried out effectively, would be good for the environment. But it needs to be a one-in-all-in thing, It is a mistake for us to have some aspects of policy still resting in the Chief Minister’s Department. In many ways, I do not mind where the environment is, under which minister the responsibility rests, but there should be clear lines and some certainty. We have seen over the last few years, under the stewardship of Jon Stanhope, Bill Wood and John Hargreaves, anything but certainty. We have had chopping and changing; we have had most of it in the old Department of Urban Services; then it was all gradually brought into the fiefdom of the Chief Minister when he became minister for the environment. Now it is all being cast off because it is, quite frankly, too difficult for the Chief Minister.
Some of the really crucial policies are still there. The areas of water and energy are still resting in the Chief Minister’s Department, but the area that used to be the Chief
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