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

Guiding Principles – Embracing UniquenessFrom the outset, the Review sought to develop recommendations that will result in tangibleand sustainable improvements in how the ACTPS goes about its work.In approaching its consideration of improvements to the ACTPS’s effectiveness, capacity andstructure, the Review adopted a principles-based approach that embraces the ACT’suniqueness. A recurring theme in consultations was that the ACTPS should stop trying to bea state government bureaucracy to which local council service delivery obligations have beenappended, and instead organise itself and operate in a way that reflects its responsibilities forproviding a range of services to the city state that it serves. The Review acknowledges thatthe ACTPS’s responsibilities range from collecting garbage, fixing potholes, and providinglocal libraries to running a gaol, a hospital system, and public schools. With this in mind ithas sought to arrange service delivery lines and responsibilities in a form that makes sensefrom the outside, as well as from the inside, and is coherent in the ACT context.The traditional hierarchical culture and structures inherited from the Commonwealth with thegranting of self government were questioned. So was the need to mirror structures that are inplace in larger Australian State Governments simply because the ACT Government hasequivalent functions.The Review has sought to develop structures that are fit for purpose in Canberra’s city stategovernment – structures that present a coherent and consistent face to the people of Canberraand make it easy to deal with the ACTPS. There are currently pockets of leading practiceincluding Canberra Connect, but there are also areas hampered by the desiccation ofstructures and roles, and division – rather than sharing – of responsibility. In part this desirefor clarity is evident in a bias in the Review’s recommendations towards fewer organisationalunits, and clear lines of accountability from those units to a single Minister. One of thechallenges in this context, ultimately stemming from the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act 1988 (Cwlth) 4 , is the size of the Ministry – itself a function of the size ofthe Assembly – relative to the volume and breadth of the ACT Government’s responsibilities.The Review has sought to reduce fragmentation, duplication and unnecessary bureaucracy.It has proceeded on the basis that structures should be clear to the citizenry of the ACT, tostakeholder groups, and to the Ministers and officials that operate within them on a dailybasis. There was a prevailing view among officials and stakeholders during consultationsthat the current ACTPS structures are over-engineered, resulting in fragmentation ofresponsibilities and creation of roles that are not necessarily well or commonly understood.The approach taken by the Review reflects the maturity of the ACT’s self governmentarrangements which are now over 21 years old. It is interesting to note that neither a singleSubmission nor a single contributor to the Review suggested that the current structures arethe ones that would be built now if you were starting from a blank sheet of paper to organise4 See http://www.comlaw.gov.au/Background to the Review: 25