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

– and enhance its capacity to provide – high quality support to the government of the day andvalued services to the people of Canberra.The ACT Government and the ACTPS are unique in the Australian context, and the Reviewhas embraced this uniqueness. It has sought to question the very traditional hierarchicalculture and structures inherited from the Commonwealth at self government. It hasquestioned the need to mirror structures that are in place in state governments simply becausethe ACT Government has equivalent functions.The ACTPS’s responsibilities range from collecting garbage, fixing potholes, and providinglocal libraries to running a gaol, hospitals, and public schools. In considering structuralforms for the ACTPS that might better support government decision making and servicedelivery capacity and performance, the Review has sought to organise service delivery linesand responsibilities in a set of arrangements that makes sense from the outside, as well asfrom the inside. This approach reflects the maturity of the ACT’s self governmentarrangements which are now some 21 years old and was reflected in a number ofSubmissions including from Anglicare Canberra & Goulburn that argued:rather than borrow from state or federal approaches which use traditionalinterdepartmental committee approaches which can degenerate into turf protection,the City State is ideally placed to create regional and population based strategicpartnerships. 101A recurring theme in consultations and Submissions to the Review was that the ACTPSsuffers from fragmentation of responsibility and a resultant lack of cohesion, and wouldbenefit from a clearer and more consistent understanding of the Government’s priorities.Furthermore, the subtleties of which Administrative Unit in the ACT’s city state governmentis responsible for which function, while important to officials are sources of confusion andfrustration for the citizenry. A common theme in consultations was that the current 24Ministries shared among five Ministers are unnecessary and confusing. A common (andunderstandable) standpoint from many contributors was that they expect to deal with “theACT Government” and to deal with it once, and if that cannot be achieved in a singletransaction, they rightly demand consistency of direction and approach.With this in mind, rather than its traditional bureaucratic structure comprising discrete,hierarchically organised entities, the Review has concluded the ACT Government and thecitizenry of Canberra would be better served by a single ACTPS agency, reporting to a singleChief Executive who would be Head of the ACTPS. In this form, it would resemble largemunicipal bodies like Brisbane City Council, and international comparators like the ViennaCity Administration, and the devolved Scottish Government.The proposed structure addresses the current desiccation of responsibilities, and avoids theloss of focus on the big picture that such fragmentation can cause. Writing about the New101 Submission No.2.Governing the City State: 73