Page 1733 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 1 May 2012
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MS GALLAGHER: One of the first speeches I made on becoming Chief Minister set out priorities for my government that focused on improving the quality of life Canberrans enjoy, creating a liveable and sustainable city, delivering critical services to the community and continuing to create opportunities for people to invest in the future of our city. I concluded those remarks with the observation:
Our success in delivering these priority projects and initiatives for the people of Canberra will rely in no small measure on the capabilities and the capacity of the ACT public service … For the government to deliver its promises to the community, we need a public service that is committed to a genuinely citizen-centred design and delivery of services. We need a public service that is open to scrutiny, open to diversity of experience and opinion, and open to innovative and new ways of thinking. We need a public service that works in genuine partnership with groups in the community with whom, and to whom, it provides services.
My intention in making this statement is to focus not on the what of government that is outlined in our government priorities but on the how, because the way in which we go about serving the people of Canberra is just as important as the services we deliver.
Discussion of standards in public life has been a feature of newspaper front pages over the past year. We have seen debates in the Assembly about standards of conduct for members, public controversy surrounding the former Commonwealth and ACT Ombudsman, both praise and criticism of those who feed WikiLeaks and outrage at the conduct of newspapers in the United Kingdom.
To my mind, these debates and discussions are valuable because they draw into sharp focus the value citizens place on integrity and probity in public life. People in institutions of influence, and I include the ACT public service in that description, are rightly held to high standards of accountability, probity and integrity in their interactions with citizens and with other institutions. Those of us in public life are properly subjected to scrutiny of our behaviour, our actions and our statements.
We are nevertheless fortunate in Australia, and in the ACT in particular, to live in a robust democracy where our police, our judiciary, our public servants and our politicians are free to discharge their functions without influence from nepotism or corruption. We are fortunate to have a public service that is apolitical, where decisions are based on merit and sound argument.
In this context, I particularly welcome the findings made by Professor John Halligan of the ANZSOG Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra in his review of the ACT’s application of the Latimer House principles on the three branches of government that was tabled in the Assembly last year. Those principles embody accepted conventions of conduct in the relationship between the executive, the parliament and the judiciary. Professor Halligan has concluded that the three branches of government in the ACT perform strongly against the Latimer principles and that the ACT system has many fine governance attributes which in combination make the system unique in the Australian context.
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