Page 2631 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 11 August 2015
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The Committee recommends that the Minister for Urban Renewal and Minister for Housing work as closely as possible on the redevelopment of public housing to ensure that residents are provided with consistent and timely information.
Recommendation 83 was about writing to public housing tenants. Recommendation 84 was about tenants in public housing assets included in the asset sales agreement being able to be relocated to suitable replacement public housing prior to the sale of the asset. There were a number of other important recommendations, and I look forward to the government meeting their commitments on several of these recommendations.
Briefly before we break, I would like to touch on fix my street, which is part of Access Canberra. During the estimates process the Chief Minister said, and I am referring to page 135 of the estimates report:
So if people wish to engage with the government, be they residents, businesses or community organisations, they have a single point of contact for engagement.
And later on that same page:
From the perspective of a consumer, which is the perspective that I am most interested in, they do not particularly care where in government services are located. Their preference, frankly, is to be able to go to one place rather than to go to many.
I absolutely agree with the Chief Minister on that.
In the government’s response to recommendation 57, the committee recommended that the ACT government closely monitor the first 12 months of Access Canberra and report to the ACT Legislative Assembly in March 2016 on its first 12 months of operation. The government agreed in principle to that. But I would like to bring to the Chief Minister’s attention a couple of points that he might like to consider when trying to bring about greater consumer-centric design for Access Canberra.
I write quite a number of letters, for example, to Minister Rattenbury, as the Minister for TAMS. Previously, they included a lot about roads. Many times when Mr Rattenbury wrote back to me, and in the Assembly here as well, he talked about how we should use fix my street to lodge these types of complaints. I took Mr Rattenbury at his word, and from 28 November 2013 to early this week I lodged 64 cases on fix my street. In looking at it early this week, I saw that nine were resolved. Nine out of 64 cases were resolved on fix my street. Fifty-two were marked as escalated and three were marked as forwarded to an SME. I am sure that some of those that are marked as escalated or forwarded have been fixed or are in the process or in progress, but from a consumer perspective that is completely invisible to me. It certainly does not fit with the rhetoric that Mr Barr used during the estimates hearings.
The biggest issue with Access Canberra, and fix my street specifically, is that with the service they do not tell you what has or has not been done. When one of my staff called them last week to query it, the person they spoke to—presumably at Access
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