Page 4738 - Week 13 - Thursday, 28 November 2019

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Thank you, minister, for this report and thank you, Arthritis ACT, for your ongoing hard work.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Access Canberra

Ministerial statement

MR RAMSAY (Ginninderra—Attorney-General, Minister for the Arts, Creative Industries and Cultural Events, Minister for Building Quality Improvement, Minister for Business and Regulatory Services and Minister for Seniors and Veterans) (11.38): Five years ago Access Canberra was born out of the commitment for the government to serve the people of Canberra better. We wanted to create a front page for government services where there would be a single point of entry, where service delivery would be streamlined and where people, businesses and organisations could come to the one location to transact their business with government in the simplest and most straightforward way possible.

Access Canberra began life on 16 December 2014 when the Chief Minister announced its formation with a no-wrong-door approach for engaging with the ACT government. It was a bold ambition as we drew together the operational arms of 11 different organisations, staffed by approximately 600 regulators, customer service officers and enabling staff responsible for administering 140 different pieces of legislation into a single organisation.

This was a mammoth task, noting that Access Canberra touches the lives of every single one of our citizens in some way every day, from maintaining registers such as births, deaths and marriages and land titles to managing all kinds of licensing, to the regulation of construction, gambling, food and alcohol. All these functions became part of the one organisation whose central mission has been to serve the Canberra community and to support the vibrant, innovative and progressive city that we have become.

Significantly, Access Canberra’s formation was the first time in Australia that multiple regulatory functions of government had been drawn together into the one agency. It is very interesting to see that a number of our colleagues in the other jurisdictions are now starting to create similar entities. The ACT continues to lead the way with its progressive forward thinking and innovative solutions.

As minister with responsibility for part of Access Canberra’s work I can attest that it is a powerhouse of productivity and is always looking for ways to better assist members of the Canberra community more effectively and more efficiently.

To get some of the idea of the scale of the operations delivered by Access Canberra, I take this opportunity to provide a summary of some of Access Canberra’s key achievements. In its five years of operation Access Canberra has served close to 2.2 million customers face to face, has answered more than 3.2 million telephone calls and processed more than 15 million online transactions. The Access Canberra website


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