Governing the City State - Chief Minister and Treasury Directorate ...

individually and collectively. Senior public servants need to engage with Ministers onwhat will make the biggest difference. 265The ACT Government’s Current Strategic Planning FrameworkThe ACT already has a sophisticated strategic planning framework including an annualresource allocation process that still clearly shows its roots in procedures received at selfgovernment from the Commonwealth. There was in consultations an overarching viewwithin and outside the ACTPS that the framework is over-engineered, contains unnecessaryduplication, and is undermined by fragmentation and dispersal of effort. The framework alsogenerates a very significant reporting burden.This reporting and administrative burden is also shared by partners in government servicedelivery in the community sector. The ACT Council of Social Services notes in itSubmission to the Review:The complexity, inconsistency, and duplication of reporting requirements do notassist services to get on with the important and vital work for which they are funded.Inconsistencies and duplications build in inefficiencies both at the government andthe sector end. The Productivity Commission has detailed this problem in their reportContribution of the Not-for-Profit Sector.The costs of performance reporting have been a repeated theme… with manyindicating that they see little value in it, in part because of both duplication and noncomparabilityarising from non-standardised data variables. 266Highlighting the need for a more manageable set of meaningful performance indicators, acontributor to the Review notes:the Government produces a large number of legislation, policies, action plans andindividual policies, many of which have reporting requirements – however much ofthis reporting gets lost or goes by the wayside. Likewise many of these plans requireagencies to do certain things which are then never actioned or even monitored to seeif they are actioned, let alone assessed to see if they are achieving intended outcomes.While the framework is conceptually strong, there is clearly scope for the ACTPS to do betterin its implementation. There was a clear and consistent view in consultations that the ACTGovernment has too many plans, leading to a propensity for the ACTPS to “tie itself inknots” with snowballing layers of plans, strategies, action plans, implementation plans,statements of intent, frameworks and performance agreements. It is worth keeping in mindthat these ACT plans are in addition to National Agreements and National Partnershipssettled by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) all of which come with anobligation to prepare and lodge detailed implementation plans, and for a small jurisdiction, avery significant reporting burden. There is therefore a clear need to take account of externalrequirements (including COAG agreements) to which the Government has committed, and to265 State Services Commission (2001) p.23.266 Submission No.19.Strategy, Resource Allocation and the Vacant Middle Ground: 213