Page 3675 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 26 August 2009
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One of the report’s recommendations is that TAMS should develop a detailed agreement with government on the service levels it must deliver. A documented process for reporting on services already exists, and a detailed agreement will certainly be beneficial. This, of course, should not be a matter just for TAMS and the government; it needs to include solid input from our community—a point Ms Le Couteur has just acknowledged—to ensure that the community itself is directly involved in identifying the community’s own priorities for service delivery.
It is in that context that I have announced a number of community forums which will be held over the next few months to explore with community representatives what are the priorities amongst the services TAMS delivers. Forums will be made up of representatives from peak bodies, including community councils, the property council and user groups such as Pedal Power. The first meeting will be held in about four weeks. Subsequent meetings—at this stage there are an anticipated eight subsequent meetings or forums—will see the groups divide into subgroups to discuss specific areas of TAMS service delivery. That work, when completed, will be distilled into a discussion paper which will be released to the public with an invitation to the broad and entire Canberra community to comment on issues that are raised and distilled in the discussion paper.
The TAMS community forums are an opportunity for the ACT government to discuss TAMS services and how we can better provide those services to the community within the allocated budget. The forums will ask where, for example, people see TAMS already working efficiently and where they believe improvements should be made. Where are there opportunities to maintain areas to a more modest standard? Are there services that we can reduce, and would that reduction of services be acceptable to the community? Are there areas where a more modest standard would be accepted in order for us to actually achieve efficiencies? Where do we need to focus more service? Is it possible for the community in a conversation or an engagement to agree to a reduction in service in some area while suggesting that services need to be enhanced in others?
The forums will also look at how we can better partner with community groups and stakeholders to deliver services. I have a personal view that we can enhance and expand the range of friends groups that work to different levels of success around Canberra, perhaps through a more broadly arranged set of partnerships. For instance, I acknowledge in the context of park care and care of particular significant areas of Canberra that the Friends of Mount Majura is an incredibly successful organisation through its energy, its lobbying, its representations and its partnerships. It has over this last year been engaged in a detailed partnership with TAMS in relation to rabbit control and eradication. It has engaged with TAMS on a project that has led to the government providing $100,000 to actually rehabilitate and to reconstruct walking trails within Mount Majura.
Those particular outcomes are a direct result of a partnership between TAMS and Friends of Mount Majura. There are other friends groups which do not have that same level of energy and have not achieved similar outcomes, but I am sure that if we actually work on partnerships we can develop a whole array of partnerships that will
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