Page 3244 - Week 10 - Thursday, 25 September 2014
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MADAM SPEAKER: Thank you. I just want to make sure that I have an understanding of the question because it has an impact on other things.
MR GENTLEMAN: I thank Dr Bourke for his question. The starting point for streamlining the relationship between the community sector and the government is to recognise the importance of that relationship and to recognise that, from time to time, some processes of government can get in the way of an efficient relationship.
We also recognised that, if we wanted a more streamlined relationship with the community sector, the starting point was in our hands. For us, that starting point was a community sector red tape forum held in February 2013 with some 65 community sector leaders. The forum showed clearly that what the sector needed from us was improvements in four areas. These were relationship management, procurement processes, contracting arrangements, and performance reporting.
Our response was to put together a whole-of-government working group to look into these areas, supported by a community sector working group. The important point here is that the process was, and continues to be, highly consultative. We worked with the sector advisory group to establish precisely how we might change procurement and how we might change contracting and improve our relationship management.
A number of reforms have since been implemented. We have implemented a single relationship management model for the Community Services Directorate. This means that even if an organisation has multiple contracts with different parts of the directorate it will only have to deal with one relationship manager. In practice, we have shifted the burden of coordination from the sector and taken this on ourselves.
We have applied a sensible approach to scaling our funding arrangements to match the risk. This means that where there are low risks we have introduced the concept of a current grant to replace more administratively complex service funding agreements. This has been a real benefit to the sector, allowing about 40 per cent of our relationships to be simplified.
We have also increased the length of service funding agreements and recurrent grants from three to five years. This change, along with simplifying payment arrangements, has led to significant cost and time saving benefits to community sector organisations.
But we did not stop there. We have simplified the conditions of our grants. For example, the old agreement could require a community sector organisation to establish a separate bank account into which our grant had to go, and nothing else. We have changed that, along with a number of other onerous provisions that delivered nothing for the sector and, quite frankly, nothing much for government. Now we are doing the same with the service funding agreements, working through them to make them simpler to use and with less administration.
Coming back to the main point, these are all sensible improvements, but it is how we are doing it that is important. We are doing it together—the government and the community sector—both parties working openly to explore how to make the relationship stronger because that is how you get long-term improvements and benefits that stick.
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