ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER
ELECTED BODY
(Reference: Estimates process 2015-16)
Members:
MS DIANE COLLINS (The Chair)
MS JOANNE CHIVERS (The Deputy Chair)
MR MAURICE WALKER
MR RICHARD ALLAN
MR TONY MCCULLOCH
MR ROSS FOWLER
TRANSCRIPT OF EVIDENCE
CANBERRA
WEDNESDAY, 9 DECEMBER 2015
Committee contact officer:
Ms Margaret Beattie
ATSIEB Secretariat
Office for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs
Community Services Directorate
GPO Box 158
CANBERRA CITY ACT 2601
APPEARANCES
i
Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate 1
Community Services Directorate 39
Environment and Planning Directorate 70
i
The elected body met at 9.31 am.
Appearances:
Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate
Nicol, Mr David, Under Treasurer
Overton-Clarke, Ms Bronwen, Deputy Director-General, Workforce Capability and Governance Division
Childs, Ms Judi, Director, Public Sector Management, Workforce Capability and Governance Division
Alderson, Dr Karl, Deputy Director-General, Policy and Cabinet
Rutledge, Mr Geoffrey, Executive Director, Strategic Policy and Cabinet
Miners, Mr Stephen, Executive Director, Finance and Budget Division
Dawes, Mr David, Director-General
Kelley, Ms Rebecca, Deputy Executive Director, Sport and Recreation Services
Hartley, Ms Laura, Senior Manager, Small Business and Skills, Innovation, Trade and Investment Branch
Hill, Mr Ian, Director, VisitCanberra
House, Mr Jeff, Deputy Director-General, Arts, Business, Events, Sport and Tourism Division
Stankevicius, Mr Adam, Director, artsACT and Events ACT
Tomlins, Mr George, Executive Director, Procurement and Capital Works
THE CHAIR: Welcome. We will start with a minute’s silence, to acknowledge those who have gone before us and the significant loss we have had in our communities this year. Thank you. Let me start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land that we are meeting on today and by paying my respects to elders, both past and present. My name is Diane Collins, and I am the Chairperson of the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elected Body. I gladly took on this position as of yesterday. I am very excited. I thank all of you for coming along. Firstly, I will ask members to introduce themselves, and identify portfolio responsibilities. Obviously mine is CMTEDD.
MR WALKER: I have the Health portfolio.
MR McCULLOCH: I have the Environment and Planning Directorate.
MR FOWLER: I have the Education and Training Directorate.
MS CHIVERS: I have the Community Services Directorate.
THE CHAIR: I have an opening statement, and then we will go to questions. As you are aware, the elected body has been working very hard over the past 12 months with the ACT government, ministers and all directorates to progress a range of issues, including improving programs and services and service delivery on behalf of and for the benefit of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples here in the ACT.
Over the next two days elected body members will be meeting with all directorates and seeking responses to questions which our communities require answers to. The elected body has been elected by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities here in the ACT to make a difference, and that is exactly what we expect of ourselves.
The elected body holds the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples central to all that we do as an elected representative voice for our peoples in our pursuit of rights and social and emotional wellbeing improvements for our communities.
You have already received a copy of the generic questions. Throughout the next two days each of the members will take the lead by asking questions relevant to each directorate. The elected body values your cooperation in this process to pursue clarity and evidence to confirm performance in relation to the achievement of outcomes.
Please focus your responses on addressing programs, services and outcomes for the benefit of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the ACT. Owing to the time frames, there may not be an opportunity to ask all the questions we have, so we will send them through to you. Also note that, for any questions taken on notice, the elected body will require a response within five working days of the hearings. You can submit those responses to our ATSIEB email address.
Let us begin. As I said, I have the lead for this. Since the 2014 hearings process we have been able to negotiate an agreement, an ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Agreement, and the Justice Partnership, which are accompanied by community priorities established in consultation with our peoples and based on their needs. This is significant for some of the lines of questioning in the hearing today.
Firstly, I acknowledge CMTEDD in terms of encouraging the directorates to use the protocols which were developed. We are very happy that some significant work has gone into that, and we are happy that CMTEDD has promoted the use of that across all directorates. Bronwen, do you have an opening statement that you would like to make?
Ms Overton-Clarke: No. We just wanted to congratulate you, Diane, on becoming the chairperson of the elected body, and also congratulations to Jo on becoming deputy chair. We are here to answer as much as we can with clarity and evidence to demonstrate performance. So we will be as clear as we can in our answers to your questions.
Mr Nicol: Madam Chair, I did write to you to say that I would be unavailable today, but there was a last-minute change. I was very keen to be here. I also want to apologise on Kathy Leigh’s behalf. She had a personal issue that she had to deal with. I would also like to acknowledge Rod Little’s contribution. I found him to be a very good person to work with, and we had a very productive relationship. I think the rest of us would concur with that. We look forward to working with you.
THE CHAIR: Thank you. The first question: the 2011 ACT public service inquiry highlighted 31 recommendations for attention for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment and retention, and included references to research done in other industries—for example, mining—to give guidance. At the last hearings you mentioned that most of the recommendations had been implemented. Can you advise which of the recommendations have not been implemented, if any, and explain what have been the effects of the ones that have been?
Ms Overton-Clarke: The main thrust of the recommendations was about getting more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into the ACT public service, retaining them better, and developing them in terms of leadership positions. I believe we have gone a substantial way towards starting that in a more systemic way than we had previously.
At the end of the last calendar year and into this year we developed the inclusion program, and the first tranche of that was the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander traineeship program, which started in August this year. We have 11 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander trainees who are with us at the moment. We started with 14, and two left because they had got better jobs. So we were comfortable about that.
We absolutely recognise, as both Kathy and I said at the hearings last year, that we need to do more systemic things to help get more people into the service. Kathy has also put performance targets into every director-general’s performance agreement, both for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and for people with disabilities. In fact, in terms of the targets for 2014-15, we exceeded the target that we had hoped for. We wanted to get an additional 30 people and we got 45. So we have started to make better progress against the targets than we had done. We absolutely recognise, as we said last year, that we were not going to hit those targets of two percent by this year. We have, we believe, started on the process of doing better in that area.
The area that we still need to work on is the leadership initiatives. We have two Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander graduates starting, as part of the 52 graduates who will start in February next year. In terms of identifying that at different levels, and bringing people in, we need to do that better. That is a good start as well. But in terms of the leadership initiatives, we need to do more work in that area.
They are the main steps that we have taken this year. I know you asked about those recommendations that we have not implemented. Judi, can you remember?
Ms Childs: I cannot, but I can take it on notice. Parallel with those recommendations we had the review of the RED framework as well. We actually wrapped all of those recommendations into an implementation plan because there was substantial crossover in some of the recommendations. I have not, as of today, done a specific audit against those recommendations. We did it a few months ago. I would be happy to provide further information.
The important shift that we have started on with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment is to develop a sustainable employment strategy, rather than just go for numbers. I think it is very easy to just go for numbers, but the proof for me will be in the sustainability of employment outcomes for the people we bring in. We have done work with Muranga Muranga, the internal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff network. They have provided mentors for the trainees in our current cohort. I have employed an additional resource in my team to work directly with the trainees in a pastoral care and nurturing type of role. It is all about sustainable outcomes, not just gaining numbers.
All of the successful trainees will be permanently appointed to the service. For the first time in a traineeship program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, the qualifications that the trainees are completing have not been a one-way street. We have not just said, “You have to do a certificate IV in government,” or whatever. We have actually looked at what people’s interests are and what the directorate’s needs are, and matched the qualifications to the trainees and placed them in roles where they can use those qualifications.
THE CHAIR: You have spoken a lot about the trainees. At other levels what recruitment efforts are happening there?
Ms Childs: We have been in negotiations with the commonwealth for some time for a bit of money. We have not got that yet. We have been analysing what our senior officer cohort is like and what the demographics are. At the moment we are finalising some work for next year in having leadership development at three levels in the organisation for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—funnelling trainees who are interested into further study, looking at our senior officer cohort and looking at our feeder group into the senior officer cohort as three separate cohorts with development needs. We are just scoping that work at the moment.
THE CHAIR: Recommendation28 refers to broadening the scope of data collections. Has this been undertaken and what findings have contributed to a shift towards meeting the 2017 targets? How many exit interviews have been completed and what have been the outcomes from the traineeship program moving back into the Chief Minister’s directorate?
Ms Overton-Clarke: Some of the things that Judi spoke about in terms of sustainability were very much the lessons that we took from the review of the previous program—things like having a permanent job at the end, and the support of trainees as they continue through the year. All of those ongoing things have been very much because of the experience of sitting in CSD. Even though at the start of that program in CSD they wanted to be able to do that, as the program went on all of those things fell away. Very much part of the transfer back into Chief Minister’s was to be able to ensure that the program was conducted in the same way across all directorates, and that there was that support function in CMTEDD. So that is the main thing, as well as working with a good provider in the territory through Habitat and being clear about the assessment process, so that trainees had the opportunity to understand at the start what the work was going to be like.
In terms of data collections, Judi just talked about the different cohorts within the territory and within the public service. As she said we are just doing that work now to look at exactly what the needs are, in terms of leadership of the different segments who are employed—the 299 employees that we have. So we are just doing that work at the moment.
THE CHAIR: And the exit interviews?
Ms Childs: Certainly, with the trainees there are exit interviews, but we would like to think we catch on before we actually have to do an exit interview. It is much more important for us to have continuous feedback. So there is not yet a wholeofgovernment exit interview process. That is one thing that my team is looking at and it will be on the work program for collection by HR directors next year, to look at how we do that, and so that we get some systemic information.
We do know that the separation rate for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff is higher than the general separation rate, so it is important to get that information. With the trainees themselves, we are much more interested in keeping them employed rather than exit interviewing them. We bring them together every six to eight weeks to try to keep on top of any emerging issues there may be that might threaten their employment.