Government Boards and Committees, 21 September 2012

only 'external' appointees. Government board or committee members who are on the
public payroll as an employee of any Australian government body are by implication
considered to be ineligible for remuneration.
Further steps were taken to improve the administration of information on Government boards
and committees. The historical list of boards and committees was shown to be unreliable
when a series of parliamentary questions on boards, committees, reviews and taskforces
produced varying answers. This highlighted the difficulty of obtaining consistent and current
information from Minister's offices and line agencies.
Two steps were taken to address this situation:
1. In addition to restricting remuneration, Premier's Circular 2010/02 emphasised the
need for all appointments to be considered by Cabinet".
2. The Department of the Premier and Cabinet and the Commission agreed to jointly
produce a database module that was integrated with the existing Public Sector
Commission Agency Information and Senior Executive Service (AISES) database.
However, by June 2011, it had become clear that the new Government boards and
committees database was not operating effectively. As a result, the public list was
removed from the Commission's website on '17 June 2011 and the use of the AISES
database module was temporarily suspended.
The Department of the Premier and Cabinet then took the following steps in order to produce
a new list of boards and committees that is consistent with this new definition:
The list was changed to include only boards and committees with paid members, in
line with the new definition. (Note: The Department of the Premier and Cabinet did
not examine whether all paid members were external because this information had
not been collected during the request for information and it was assumed that as
members were being paid they were external.)
Minister's offices and line agencies were asked to correct and update the information
from the inaccurate AISES list;
All Cabinet approval sheets since September 2008 were checked to identify any
boards and committees that had not been listed already;
Inquiries were made to Ministers' offices regarding any previously unlisted boards
and committees that appeared on the approval sheets.
This process resulted in a list of 388 boards and committees as of 17 August 2011. A
high level review by the Commission of a 10 per cent random sample of the list of 388
II This affirmed the Cabinet process as the Government's primary source of information on boards and committees and
signalled a desire to move away from reliance on direct correspondence with Minister's offices and agencies. It also affirmed
the need to maintain accurate information from week to week, rather than compiling information on an ad hoc basis
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