Page 91 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 12 February 2008
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The TAMS unit is called community engagement and communications. It is responsible for branding, marketing, publications, media launches, events, community engagement activities and general communication functions across the department. I am very concerned when I see community engagement rolled into media launches, branding and marketing. I fear that that is too much what community engagement has become.
The ACT Department of Territory and Municipal Services recently—I think it is recent; it arrived in my office recently but it is not dated and I am interested to know when it was produced—produced the community engagement policy of TAMS. This is where I found the decision-making process for the ACT. There is a diagram on page 3 which, in the lovely printed copy, has a green circle in the middle with the words “Decision Making Point”. It is the exact colour of the Greens’ logo, by the way; that was probably a good choice on the part of the government. When you print that document from the web, you get a grey area in the middle with the words “Decision Making Point”. With a different printer, it could be a black hole called “Decision Making Point”.
I am interested to know what goes into this decision-making point. It appears that a lot goes into it. It includes community engagement, governance and legislation, relevant research and case studies, resource implications, minister and cabinet, contractors and consultants, TAMS staff—because we are talking about TAMS here—environmental factors and, in bold print, “Community Engagement”. It is very difficult to tell what proportion of input those categories have. I would be interested to know whether “Minister & Cabinet” is a little bit, a very acute angle or a more obtuse angle. In the end, I did not find that a particularly helpful document. But I know that decisions get made and I know consultations are held, so again what is going on here?
In 2005 the government’s community engagement manual was produced with great effect, great pomp. I have just checked out the minister’s speech; he was incredibly proud of this document. It was Mr Hargreaves, by the way. It was called Your guide to engaging with the community. I assume that is the basis for the TAMS document.
One of the glories of being in the Assembly for a long time is this. Of course, the Greens do not waste paper, so we have got filing cabinets crammed full of documents. In our community consultation file, one of the things that I was really interested in—I wondered why we do not have it today—is a register of community consultation. This register was produced on 12 June 1998. It appears—others who have been here longer might be able to inform me—that departments were required to report on the consultations they were doing: the target group, the process they used, the time frame and status, the groups and individuals consulted, the regions consulted and the feedback methods to participants. By the way, the engagement manual says that feedback to participants is a really crucial part of the process, because they need to know that the effort they put into that consultation was worth while.
I do not see anything like this. On the community engagement website of today, there is—this is very useful, of course—a list of some consultations that are occurring, but it is out of date and it has on it a couple of things that have already occurred. That is
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