Page 2136 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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adopted a “hide under the covers” approach to, and that is taking positive steps right now to ameliorate the inevitable impacts of fossil fuel shortages and climate change on a city that is wedded to the car and which is already facing water shortages.
The accountability and the strategic indicators in this year’s budget are of more significance than usual due to changes to the Chief Minister’s annual report directions. I want to commend the latest annual report directions that recently came to the public accounts committee because it is very evident to me, as someone who has been on the PAC for four years, that those annual report directions have improved over those years in terms of reporting on environmental issues and in terms of setting up strategic indicators.
Since the start of my term I have been pushing very hard for Treasury to take on triple-bottom-line accounting mechanisms for the ACT. In fact, I was just looking for a folder and I saw all the correspondence that passed between me and Mr Quinlan when he was the Treasurer. I would have to say that things appear to have slowed down on that front since Mr Quinlan has left, though I have to say that they were moving at a glacial speed even when he was here.
The latest terminology is sustainability reporting, but essentially it is the same as triple-bottom-line reporting. Greens around the world are working to integrate social, environmental and cultural costs into financial accounting systems. We all understand that climate change will affect our budget; but it seems that exactly how has been too hard for ACT Treasury to understand and implement. This is really rather curious given that it knows how to repackage standard budgetary items as climate change initiatives.
One thing that I have noticed over the years is that from year to year indicators were changing so radically that it has become almost impossible to track whether one year’s outputs were any better than the previous year’s. One major step towards sustainability reporting is the fact that annual reports will now have to report on the indicators set out in the budget, which will give members and the public an opportunity to examine more closely how the government is performing in those areas. I am very pleased about this little bit of progress. I am fairly sure that, as long as the government can continue to work with these same indicators, perhaps to refine them so that they become more meaningful while maintaining the essential core so they can be tracked over years, we will start to get a real feel as to whether the ACT is making progress on the social and environmental as well as economic grounds.
Budgets, of course, are far more than that but that is as far as we have gone so far with implementing sustainability budgeting. Without a system of environmental accrual accounting such as triple bottom line, it is difficult for voters to judge the proportion of expenditure actually aimed at addressing climate change. By measuring and anticipating the social, environmental and financial consequences of policy and investment decisions, triple-bottom-line accounting would enable us to escape from the greenwash spin cycle by providing credible measures of climate change expenditure and benefits. I look forward to Treasury doing further work in this area. As I said before, in talking about the Auditor-General, I believe that her office has people in it with such expertise and I would suggest that the Treasurer call upon them to work with Treasury.
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