Page 2229 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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account to the people of Canberra for its waste, its wrong priorities and its financial incompetence.
On balance, despite the Auditor-General being hamstrung by an arrogant and uncooperative government, I believe that the Office of the Auditor-General more than meets its strategic goals. The Auditor-General takes her role seriously and delivers carefully considered recommendations that are designed to deliver an accountable, effective and efficient public sector. It is a pity that this Labor government does not regard the role and outcomes of the Auditor-General with the same seriousness. Through the Assembly, the Auditor-General provides a very valuable service to the people of Canberra. I commend her work.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (5.24): The appropriation to the Auditor-General remains much the same as last year’s apart from CPI increases. However, the Auditor-General did not request an increase this year, as she was able to claim that income from audits covered most of the needs for the audits she anticipated her office would conduct in this financial year.
The Auditor-General again expressed her major concern, which is about the difficulty of attracting and retaining employees with a high skills base when private firms and the federal government are offering more attractive salaries and seemingly sexier work. Current staff turnover is running at 30 per cent; the constant cycle of recruiting, retraining and then replacing staff is no doubt a huge source of frustration to the office.
Although the Auditor-General’s office is a small one, the ACT fares well from its team. Per ratio of staff and the ACT population, the Auditor-General and her staff provide value for money in the number of audits they manage to conduct annually. The audits serve several purposes, all of them contributing to good governance in the ACT.
First, the audits alert the government to practices and performance within the public service, thus giving government an objective and authoritative basis on which to require improvements, bestow praise and otherwise monitor the way that the bureaucracy is carrying out the functions of government. Second, the audits provide the Assembly with important on-the-ground information, beyond government rhetoric, about the way that government is carried out—the accountability and transparency functions. Third, the audits alert interested members of the public and stakeholders to issues in the conduct of government and the management of funds. Fourth, the audits often go behind the single bottom line and identify social and environmental issues related to the subject of audit, which are of increasingly obvious importance.
Finally, the audits often suggest remedies for the problems they identify and propose benchmarks for follow-up evaluation. There is the report into Rhodium, for instance, though it did not go as far as some of us thought it should in pointing to where the responsibility might lie for wastage of money and evident incompetence. Similarly, the report into the EpiCentre debacle—I have to use the word “debacle” about that—put before us the evidence of the case: the comings and goings, and the poor communication, among other things.
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