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

• emerging issues and risks and how these might be managed; and• organisational capacity plans.Agencies currently also prepare strategies or action plans that focus on specific issues in theirsphere of operations and responsibility (but require effort from agencies across government).These documents include, for example:• the Strategic Plan for Positive Ageing;• the Young People’s Plan;• the ACT Affordable Housing Strategy; and• the ACT Chronic Disease Strategy.Shared Outcomes – Shared PrioritiesAchieving many Government priorities and long-term goals will depend on contributionsfrom a range of Directorates, and require coordinated activity across government. Suchcooperation between Directorates requires clear understandings of roles and responsibilities ifit is not to increase duplication, and to ensure the most effective use of expertise, experienceand resources across government. The ACT Government employs a range of mechanisms tofoster across government cooperation and shared delivery of priorities. These include:• executive strategic planning committees providing whole of government direction;• statutory positions with the power to direct and coordinate activity across government toachieve particular objectives;• policy development forums to share expertise and experience in developing policies andprograms; and• interdepartmental working groups to develop and manage specific programs andinitiatives.There is also a clear and ongoing role for the proposed Chief Minister’s Department inbringing together Directorates to tackle these difficult and cross cutting issues.An issue for discussion in the future will be the capacity for appropriations to be moreflexibly allocated to cross cutting issues, reflecting the networked governance modelsdescribed in Chapter 3.ReportingThe ACTPS currently prepares a range of reports which reflect the hierarchy of strategicplans, and provide a broad picture of performance, from long-term outcomes, tomedium-term priorities and results, and near-term actions and initiatives. In so doing, itsuffers from the organic growth of an enormously complex reporting framework, itself acreature of a planning and performance framework that is not as streamlined and aligned as itcould be for a city state government. This organic growth manifests itself in the fact thatthere is not a single repository of performance information, nor is there a common system orprocess for seeking and providing input to reports. It is evident in the need to ask foroverlapping streams of performance data which while similar, are not coherently aligned.Strategy, Resource Allocation and the Vacant Middle Ground: 219