Watts SimonSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much Mr Chair. It's an absolute pleasure to take a call on this bill and let's get straight to it. Let's get to Part 1 and clause 3 Purpose". My question here to the member is in regards to the statement that "The purpose of this Act is to improve the effectiveness and accountability of public service agencies". My question to the member is quite simply: can she articulate to us how she believes that this legislation is actually going to lead to an improvement in the effectiveness of these organisations? As we know quite simply the definition of effectiveness is around increasing the outputs or the results of these Public Service organisations and I guess what I am reading into this aspect of the clause is that there's an inherent conflict in that because surely we're now creating a bureaucracy that has to go through and review within a period of six months all of these documents that are out there within the Public Service and make sure that they comply with this bureaucratic legislation. But that effort has to be undertaken by someone—right? It has to be undertaken by a very finite workforce that we've got at the moment and that means that you can't do two things at once. Particularly this Government can't but most people can't. So if they're going to be reviewing this to make sure that this legislation is in place to improve the effectiveness how are they going to be able to focus on the true deliverables that our Public Service entities should be delivering? They can't do both so I want to understand from the member in terms of how in practice this will improve the effectiveness. The second aspect around that is in regards to the implication of undertaking this piece of work which will mean that other work will not get undertaken and what impact has the member assessed in regards to the potential delays that this will cause in decision making within our public sector system? The reality is that if you're going to have to go through and undertake checks and balances and reviews of materials that are published to the public to make sure that they're compliant with this legislation then that will take time and that means that as a result the ability for Public Service entities to actually get information out to the public will be delayed—right? So that's in here under clause 3. So my question is: what consideration has been given under improving the effectiveness of Public Service organisations by the fact that quite simply this legislation will cause additional delays in decision making by Public Service entities because they have to now undertake this new piece of work that previously they wouldn't have had to do. So how is that being considered particularly if you think that we've just been through a period of a COVID pandemic and there was the significant need to make decisions under pressure and at pace. Can you imagine now going through that COVID process—hopefully we don't have to go through that again. But you can imagine that—and I'm going back to this clause 3 of the bill under Part 1. Well now before we send out that communication we'd better just make sure that it complies with this element and even if that takes half a day that's going to impact the decision making. Therefore it conflicts with the whole purpose of this bill around improving the effectiveness of our Public Service agencies. So those are the questions that I'm really wanting to get some comfort on. I'm sure the work and the due diligence around that has been undertaken but we haven't even talked about what the actual implication around cost is as a result of that. But we'll come back there when we get another opportunity. Thank you Mr Chair."