Over the past fortnight, I’ve had the opportunity to ask ministers and government officials a lot of questions about their performance at my first round of Annual Reports hearings as an MLA. It’s been an eye-opening experience.
I’ve learned a lot, and have been impressed by some of the witnesses, but have also had moments of intense frustration at not being able to get a straight answer to direct questions. In some areas, it’s probably safe to say our government has an accountability problem.
Here are some of the issues I asked questions about.
Family, Domestic and Sexual Violence Support
Women fleeing violence in their own homes often leave with absolutely nothing. I’ve heard from multiple local crisis service providers that this is one of the main barriers to leaving. To help address this problem, the ACT Government created a program that offers $2,000 in cash to help support people trying to escape violent situations. It’s not much, but enough to fund temporary accommodation, food, clothing and other essentials. Having been told by one service provider that the ‘Safer Families Assistance Payment’ had recently been discontinued, I asked the head of the Community Services Directorate whether that was true. We learned that, indeed, it was because the funding allocated to the program had been exhausted — only halfway through the financial year. Rather than seek more funding, the government chose to respond by pulling down the website where people and service providers apply for the grant, which seems pretty clearly inadequate to me. I’ve since called for the program to be reinstated with additional funding, but haven’t heard anything from the government about heeding that call.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs
The ACT is a signatory to the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which came into effect in 2020. It’s a ten-year agreement, so we’re now halfway through, and sadly many indicators are still stagnating or even going backward. 12 months ago, the Productivity Commission released a damning report criticising governments across Australia for failing to deliver on the agreement. The Commission recommended 16 essential actions be undertaken to course correct and start actually delivering on Closing the Gap. The ACT Government agreed to implement 15 of these actions. During a 20-minute exchange with the government officials responsible for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, I couldn’t get an answer on exactly how many agreed actions have been implemented. I was told we’ll find out in May when they report back to the Productivity Commission. I have to say, I didn’t leave the hearing feeling very confident about that being a positive report.
I also asked officials from the Justice and Community Safety Directorate about the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our criminal justice system, and was told we’re awaiting a report from the Jumbunna Institute on the topic which will guide reform in this area. The ACT has the highest Indigenous incarceration gap in Australia; the latest Productivity Commission data released this month shows you’re 22 times more likely to be imprisoned as an Indigenous person in Canberra than a non-Indigenous person. The government has a goal to reduce this gap to zero by 2031, but it doesn’t seem like any significant work is happening (yet) to move us toward that target. In fact, the gap grew slightly in the last year.
The Alexander Maconochie Centre
Speaking of incarceration, we also heard a fair bit about issues in our prison, the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC). Some of the questioning was framed around tragic recent events, with two more Aboriginal people dying in custody in the AMC this month. The Corrections Official Visitor, who provides independent oversight for what happens in the AMC, said that the level of healthcare made available to inmates is not equivalent to that available to the broader community. She indicated there are issues with access to medication for conditions like ADHD, and also drew a correlation between boredom in the AMC and the level of drug use among inmates. Inmates coming out of our system reoffend at a higher rate than anywhere else in Australia. Sadly, reoffending rates among Indigenous inmates released from the ACT increased further in the last year to 73.9 per cent (while they decreased slightly among non-Indigenous inmates). There’s clearly a lot to fix in our prison; we simply are not effectively rehabilitating offenders. I’ll continue digging and pushing to help ensure we see some meaningful change.
Aquatic Facilities Funding
There’s been a lot of talk about Canberra’s pools recently. I was at Dickson Pool a few weeks ago where they had to implement a one-out, one-in policy because the pool had reached capacity. While fellow Independent Fiona Carrick has been leading the charge on calls to save Phillip Pool, I’ve been trying to understand the plan for Civic Pool and the proposed aquatic centre in Commonwealth Park. I asked the Chief Minister about this, and he indicated the government is committed to ensuring there’s no gap in amenity for pool users in the city, meaning Civic Pool won’t be decommissioned until after the Commonwealth Park pool is built. I also took the opportunity to ask the Sports Minister why, according to a Royal Lifesaving report, the ACT was the only jurisdiction to receive $0 of the $316.5 million in federal funding delivered or promised for aquatic facilities across the country from 2017 to 2022. I was gobsmacked to hear that the reason we’ve not received any federal funding is simply that we haven’t asked for any. She also confirmed that we’ve not received any funding since 2022. Why has the ACT Government failed to even attempt to access federal funding for aquatic facilities over the last eight years? It just doesn’t make sense to me, especially given a new ‘City Aquatic Facility’ was identified as a ’high priority’ in the 2013 ACT Government Aquatic Facilities Planning Framework. I’ll be following this closely as plans progress for an aquatic facility in Commonwealth Park, and will certainly be leaning on the government to push hard for the feds to cough up their fair share to deliver that project.
Environmental Conservation
The Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment is an independent office holder who provides advice to the government on the state of the environment and what’s needed to preserve the ecological diversity of our territory. She was very candid in her testimony, confirming in a response to one of my questions that she’d never found any examples of the ACT Government choosing environmental conservation over development. This helps explain why projects like the new telecommunications tower in the Ainslie Volcanics Grasslands have been approved, which you may have seen led to the arrest this week of one of the volunteers who has poured countless hours into cultivating the site. I was on the phone with Amy as the police arrived, and showed up just as she was being arrested and taken away. To me, her arrest was a stark symbol of the government’s misplaced priorities when it comes to balancing commercial interests with environmental conservation efforts and community concerns. The whole thing is such a failure of process, and just really sad.
I was particularly disappointed to see drilling commence in these grasslands on Tuesday after the ACT Government ignored a multipartisan call last week to preserve a community garden that had been cultivated in the backyard of a public housing dwelling in Ainslie. Twice within a week, the efforts of volunteers in Ainslie have been degraded and dismissed through careless, siloed government decision-making processes.
Standing with community members and Senator David Pocock, ACT Greens Leader Shane Rattenbury and Liberal MLA Peter Cain calling on the government to preserve the community garden cultivated by volunteers in Ainslie.
Other Surprises
Like I said earlier, we learned a lot in the past fortnight! A few other tidbits:
- Having heard from someone who’s moving to Canberra from interstate and has struggled to get a building licence here, I asked about the process and discovered there’s a 6-8 month wait for building licences in the ACT. That struck me as problematic, to say the least, given the ongoing housing crisis.
- I queried safety within the Adult Mental Health Unit, and asked why a 14-year-old child was transferred to this facility. We learned that there was a problem with a door in the adolescent facility that needed to be fixed in order to avoid such transfers in the future… Let’s hope that door is sorted urgently.
- The Auditor-General expressed serious concerns about deficiencies in the government’s implementation of his recommendations. I asked if he’d seen any change since raising those concerns 12 months prior, and he said he hadn’t. I also asked about his five ongoing audits of the Digital Health Record, which he indicated wasn’t likely to be “any less interesting or significant” than the human resources IT system that the government spent almost $78 million on before scrapping the project entirely. I’ll be watching this closely.
I also asked questions about social housing, our healthcare workforce, the Strong Foundations education reforms, disability inclusion, plans for a new stadium, gambling reform, migrant settlement, the night-time economy, management of the ACT’s finances, community sport facilities, issues in our child protection system and at the Bimberi Youth Justice Centre, footpath maintenance and upgrades, and more.
It was a very busy fortnight, and I’m looking forward to following up on some of these lines of inquiry at future Annual Reports and Budget Estimates hearings. Each Assembly Committee will produce a report coming out of this round of hearings, including providing the government with recommendations for change. While I participated in hearings across every portfolio area, I’ll only have the opportunity to contribute to recommendations for the Committees of which I am a member, which are the Social Policy Committee and the Economic, Industry and Recreation Committee. I’ll keep you posted about those reports, which will be published in May.
If there’s anything you’d like to see me ask about at future hearings or in the Chamber, please reach out via [email protected].
We’re turning our minds in the office to next week, when the Assembly is sitting again from Tuesday to Thursday. As of this Monday, my office is now fully staffed and in full swing following an extensive recruitment process over summer. We’ve managed to assemble a fantastic team of passionate, smart, energetic people who are all excited to deliver for the people of Kurrajong.
Stay tuned for another update soon.