Page 2071 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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important sector for this city—is now reduced to two or three pages, and that just is not an annual report. We are saying that it should include more detailed reporting on their activities, particularly visitor numbers and, where appropriate, breakdowns by tourism campaigns and activities. If you read the tourism section in the annual report from the last financial year, you will have noted that it is very hard to get a picture of what tourism is up to in this territory or the importance of tourism, and in particular where tourism in this city is going.
Recommendation 24 goes back to a theme that emerged, and it is about the whole-of-life impact that our purchases have, in this case in the IT sector, on the environment. Again, we are just saying that the bottom line, the dollar, is very important. I think in these hard times everybody knows that the dollar is important; it always has been important. But it is about how you account for the value and the cost to the territory over the life of a product, and recommendation 24 in that regard is very important.
The lack of consultation, in a way, came up again in recommendation 25, in that the Department of Treasury has a new community insurance scheme, but it would appear from commentary that very few people know that it is there. So you have got something that supports the community but you do not tell them it is there. You have to question the commitment and the need to have the product if that is the approach that is going to be taken. It is very important, particularly for community organisations—and we all know the difficulties that many of them have had in accessing insurance over time—that, if we have got a product that was put there to help them, we need to make it easier for people to know that it is actually there.
The last one I will speak to is recommendation 27. Exhibition Park Corporation has been asked to encourage other clients to adopt and implement the National Folk Festival’s approach to waste removal and recycling options. I think that is a worthy recommendation. We said earlier in the recommendations that Australian Capital Tourism should do exactly the same thing, particularly for the events that they run. Floriade is perhaps the single biggest event that is run in this territory annually, and it would be great if Floriade followed the Folk Festival’s example.
You have got to give credit to the Folk Festival and the commitment by people over time. They are not just interested in their music and in the words in a song; they are interested in the whole world that they live in, and that is, of course, represented through the music, the song and the dance. But the work that they do, the way that they do it, the fact that they can do it and that they have proved that it does work and it has not made the event unviable is a clear indication to the community that this is a good way forward.
There are 27 recommendations in the report. I thank the secretary, Andrea, for putting together the report. It is a good report. I thank those that attended. I thank my colleagues for the many days that we spent there together and for the robust discussion that we had as we got together to put this report together. I commend the report to the Assembly.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (12.05): I think that in the tabling of this report, the comments in relation to the Auditor-General cannot go un-noted, especially
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