I hope you enjoyed a break over the Reconciliation Day long weekend, and that you get some time to recharge over the upcoming long weekend as well. I’m relishing the opportunity to take a little bit of a break with my family between some very busy periods in the Assembly. 

In case you missed it, I’m looking for an Office Manager to join my team. This role is perfect for someone who’s passionate about connecting with people and achieving outcomes for our community, and will enjoy working in a fast-paced environment as part of a small, agile, motivated team. If you or anyone you know might be interested, further information is available here – applications close next Wednesday.

Visiting the St Joseph’s Early Learning Centre in O’Connor last month

Read on for:

• Whistleblowing Reform
• A New Independent in the Assembly
• NDIS Forum
• ACT Government Procurement 
• Community Sector Funding Boost
• Saul Eslake’s Report Into the Fiscal Sustainability of the ACT 
• Upcoming Phone Me Friday and Mobile Office

Whistleblowing Reform

Last week, I moved a motion in the Assembly calling for a stronger whistleblower framework in the ACT. 

It’s critical that our laws provide appropriate protections and support for public servants who take the courageous step of speaking out about corruption, maladministration, abuse of power, misuse of public funds and unethical conduct within government institutions.

The motion called on the ACT Government to follow NSW in establishing a dedicated whistleblower support service providing casework, legal and wellbeing support for public sector workers who want to expose wrongdoing in their workplace. I also called for the Government to provide an update on the implementation of recommendations from a review of our whistleblowing laws that they commissioned back in 2023. They ‘noted’ all the recommendations from the review at the time and promised to provide a more detailed response within this term of government, but we’ve not heard anything since then.

I was really pleased to receive unanimous support for my motion. 

My office and I had negotiated with the Government ahead of time to land an agreed position, as I was keen to ensure they would follow through on the motion’s calls. I was appreciative of the Chief Minister’s willingness to back my push for a stronger whistleblowing framework from the outset, and we had a follow-up chat about it today as well.

I was disappointed, though, that Labor and the Liberals then teamed up to block the publication of documents from two whistleblowers that I had tabled during the debate in demonstrating the need for a stronger whistleblowing framework.

The documents included a disclosure and accompanying statement from an employee at the Canberra Institute of Technology (CIT) alleging maladministration involving CIT’s Electric Vehicle TAFE Centre of Excellence, and a disclosure and statement from Brendan Moyle, the former head of the ACT Office of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, about the ACT Government’s failure to deliver on its commitments to First Nations people.

In both cases, the whistleblowers alleged that their serious allegations were not escalated appropriately, or acted upon in any meaningful way, despite having raised them internally on multiple occasions through multiple reporting lines.

Our whistleblowing laws provide specific protections for public servants whose disclosures have not been actioned to bring them to parliamentarians, which is exactly what had happened in both cases. I tabled the formal whistleblowing reports that had been made, and provided to me after each whistleblower received independent legal advice to ensure they were protected, as well as accompanying statements detailing their experiences and frustrations. The crossbench voted for the documents to be made public, but the major parties disagreed.

In blocking the publication of these documents, they essentially voted to undermine the intent of our whistleblowing laws.

I've got an opinion piece in the Canberra Times about this today, where I go into more detail about what happened – you can read it here.

You can also check out my voting record on the motion here for further information, and learn more about how I support whistleblowers here. 

A New Independent in the Assembly

As you may have seen, former Liberal Leader Leanne Castley announced her resignation from the Canberra Liberals this week. Ms Castley will now become the third independent MLA on the crossbench. 

The allegations of bullying raised by Ms Castley are deeply concerning, and I was disappointed to hear that things had become so toxic for her that she decided to leave her party. Everyone deserves a safe and respectful workplace. To be honest, I think the toxic nature of politics is one of the reasons many people don’t trust politicians and are turned off by politics. There’s a big difference between robust debate in the political arena and bullying, harassment or intimidation – I don’t see why we should view the latter as a necessary corollary of the former.

It will be a significant shift in the makeup of the Assembly. The Liberals will now need the support of the Greens plus one independent to pass motions and legislation (if they can’t get support from Labor), which of course means the Greens will either need to go to Labor or to the Liberals plus one independent to get anything up.

While of course we disagree on some things, I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to work with Ms Castley, as with all of my colleagues in the Assembly, to deliver for our community. 

NDIS Forum

Thank you to everyone who participated in the recent community forum I co-hosted with Senator David Pocock and Fiona Carrick MLA on the proposed changes to the NDIS.

There’s a huge amount of stress, fear and uncertainty in the disability community right now. It meant a lot to hear directly from people in our community about how the NDIS affects their lives, and about the heartbreaking impact of the multiple major changes to the scheme that have been announced over recent months and years – often with barely any detail.

Senator Pocock, Ms Carrick and I each stated our commitment to take the questions, concerns and experiences of the NDIS participants, carers and providers we heard from back to our respective parliaments. I voiced some of those concerns in the Assembly last week, and I’ve formally lodged a number of the questions with the ACT Government as well.

A big thank you to Senator Pocock and his team for putting together the event and for always looking to collaborate in the best interests of Canberrans. 

You can watch a recording of the forum here.

ACT Government Procurement

The ACT Government recently introduced reforms to encourage government agencies to purchase more goods and services from Canberra-based SMEs, but a question I asked in the Assembly revealed they aren’t measuring how much government spending actually goes to those businesses.

How are we supposed to know if our local procurement policies are achieving their aims if we’re not even tracking the data?

Canberra is home to so many innovative SMEs doing incredible work, particularly in the tech sector, but I consistently hear from impressive local firms that are picking up government contracts across the border and abroad who can’t get a look-in when they bid for ACT Government work. 

Canberra-based SMEs aren’t necessarily asking for special treatment; they just want to be fairly considered on their merits, rather than being excluded in favour of interstate and multinational competitors. It’s in all our interests to see more of our public funds staying here in the ACT.

I’m keen for the ACT Government to get serious about backing local industries and buying from local firms – at both the head contractor and subcontract level – and this is something I’ll keep pushing for in the Assembly.

You can read the questions I asked about this here, and there’s an excellent analysis of the broader challenges facing local SMEs when it comes to competing for government contracts in a recent Canberra Times article here.

Community Sector Funding Boost

Last week, I was pleased to see the ACT Government announce a near $60 million boost to the community sector as part of the 2026-27 ACT Budget. The announcement contains a $23.7 million permanent funding uplift for the community services sector and $14.8 million in ongoing funding for community legal assistance organisations and other justice support, among other measures.  

I wrote to the Chief Minister in April calling for a funding uplift for the community sector to fulfill commitments contained in our supply-and-confidence agreement, so it was a very welcome announcement.

This funding offers a lifeline to community organisations that do such critical work providing vital services to some of our most vulnerable community members, and haven’t been sufficiently resourced to meet growing demand for years. 

I’ll be looking for further detail on this announcement, and many others, when the Territory Budget is handed down next Wednesday.

You can learn more in my media release here.

Saul Eslake's Report into the Fiscal Sustainability of the ACT

Saul Eslake’s recent report as part of an Assembly Committee's Inquiry into Fiscal Responsibility was released last week and has sparked significant public debate about the ACT Government’s financial position.

The report points to a clear trend: government spending on services and infrastructure has continued to grow without sufficient revenue growth to match it. The result has been higher debt, larger deficits and increasing interest repayments.

For me, the key takeaway is that we need to be spending public funds smarter.

Smarter spending means investing upstream in prevention and early intervention to reduce costs on acute services downstream, and ensuring taxpayers’ money is being used efficiently.

This obviously needs to happen when it comes to big projects that make headlines, but also in all the smaller decisions being made by the ACT Government. Take the recent issues surrounding CIT governance and recruitment as an example. The Skills Minister approved $52,000 for external recruitment services to help with appointing a new chair and deputy chair to the CIT Board. The Board then spent a further $38,500 on recruitment services to hire a new CEO – a process that ultimately became highly controversial. Following that controversy, the Skills Minister commissioned a review of the recruitment process at an additional cost of $44,000. Altogether, that’s $134,500 spent on consultants in relation to Board and executive recruitment – including on the recruitment of a CEO that was then found by an Assembly Committee to have actively misled her Board in relation to a misconduct finding in her previous role! All before anyone is actually paid a dollar of their salary for delivering any tangible outcomes for staff and students at CIT.

That amount on its own is obviously nowhere near enough to fix the budget, but it raises a broader question: how often are these kinds of avoidable costs being incurred across different areas of government? How many millions of dollars are being wasted because of poor systems, duplicative processes, lack of oversight or governance failures?

At the same time, there are clear examples where smarter investment could reduce long-term costs. Last financial year, the ACT Government spent almost $2.5 million on legal damages and costs arising from injuries caused by damaged footpaths, while spending only $6.6 million on actually maintaining and repairing footpaths.

Just four per cent of our total health budget goes to preventative health measures. More than 50 per cent of Canberrans have a chronic health condition and 25 per cent have a mental illness, yet we’re spending barely anything on things that can prevent these issues, like community sport, active travel infrastructure, wellness programs, and social connection. We’re seeing massively ballooning costs in our hospital system – which accounts for a third of the ACT’s budget – but we’re not seeing the political courage needed to invest sufficiently in programs that help keep people out of hospital in the first place.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be spending money on our health system; far from it. But if we're serious about improving fiscal responsibility, the conversation can't just be about spending less or taxing more. It has to be about spending better – including investing in prevention and early intervention, reducing waste and cost blow-outs, improving oversight and scrutiny, and making sure every dollar spent actually delivers outcomes for our community.

These are the things I’ll be looking for when the ACT Budget is handed down next Wednesday 10 June at 5pm. I’ll send out a budget breakdown next week once my team and I have had a chance to look through the papers. I'm also on the Budget Estimates Committee this year, so will be doing a lot of further digging into the Territory's finances over the next couple of months as part of that.

You can read Mr Eslake’s report here.

Upcoming Phone Me Friday and Mobile Office

My next Phone Me Friday is tomorrow (Friday 5 June) from 11:30am to 12:30pm.

My next Mobile Office will be at the Campbell Shops on Friday 26 June from 3:30pm to 4:30pm.

You can find all my upcoming events and RSVP for them here. 

As always, please reach out any time on [email protected] or (02) 6205 1475 during office hours.

Thank you for your support,

Tom