As part of the 25th celebrations, the Head of Service asked directorates to identify projects that demonstrate the ACTPS innovative thinking. Directorates developed articles for staff newsletters and Head of Service all staff messages to showcase the achievements. Some of these articles are included below.
Walk-in-Centres a step in the right direction for ACT Health
One of the ACT Government's many firsts was opening a public, nurse-led Walk-in Centre at the Canberra Hospital in May 2010. The Centre was designed to help people get free, episodic treatment for minor illnesses and injuries and provide an alternative to attending the emergency department.
From humble beginnings, we now have Walk-in Centres in Gungahlin, Tuggeranong and Belconnen, so you don't have to travel far for treatment.
Our first Walk-in Centre saw around 250 people each week in its first two months. Today, our three Walk-in Centres see around 200 people every day! Over a third of Canberrans have been to a Walk-in Centre in the last two years. And the vast majority agree they are a great service, with a very positive response and regular compliments from the community on the availability of the Walk-in Centres and the care and professionalism of their staff.
Our Walk-in Centres play a valuable role in meeting Canberrans' health care needs, particularly after hours, and have reduced the amount of people going to emergency departments.
They are also part of Canberra's wider health care network, referring patients to other services where required.
By considering the needs of our community and moving away from how it's 'always been done', this innovative format of health care has given many Canberrans much needed help. And we're not stopping here:
- After a successful pilot program for sexual health screening in Walk-in Centres, we are now exploring how the centres can provide more support with sexual health services.
- We have implemented a dental pain pathway so that patients can be assessed and provided with interim treatment.
- An experienced and highly skilled physiotherapist has started a trial in the Belconnen Walk-in Centre to treat patients with musculoskeletal injuries. If successful, we will look into rolling this out across all the Walk-in Centres. The trial was very successful and is now being made permanent.
We are excited to be extending this service, with a new centre opening in Weston Creek later this year and plans underway for a fifth centre in the Inner North in 2020.
Access Canberra
Seen the videos? Read the quirky job ads? Heard the word on the street that it’s the place where things are done a little differently? Yep, it’s Access Canberra.
Created in 2014, Access Canberra brings together key areas of regulation and compliance across government to support business, industry and community.
To do this the highly skilled teams cut through red tape like butter, streamline services like Lycra and use data-driven risk and insights to inform key enforcement interventions.
Thrown in with this is a sense of fun, a drive for innovation and our citizens being firmly at the heart of what we do.
Head of Access Canberra Dave Peffer said that from its inception Access Canberra created an environment of innovation and ongoing improvement.
“The remit of Access Canberra is huge – from our front line service delivery through our Service Centres and Contact Centre to our field based regulation and enforcement activities around building quality, WWVP and Worksafe, to the teams who drive our digital service improvement and how we communicate with our community,” he said.
“We are constantly looking at new ways to do things and make doing business with government easier for our community. A key example of this is the ongoing growth in digital services – just last year we brought birth registration online as well as the community being able to see footage or photos of their speeding or parking offences. This joined the recent addition of driver licence renewal and enables our community to interact with us even more from the comfort of their home any time of the day.”
Dave said Access Canberra’s recruitment approaches were also well known for pushing the envelope (a recent gem “Just like convincing people that pineapple does belong on pizza, Access Canberra is looking for great communicators who are up for a challenge”) and were getting some attention nationally.
“We are always looking to attract not only the right people, but people who bring fresh and diverse approaches and ideas to the work we do,” he said. “So far we’ve only made the news with one of the ads, but we have attracted some incredible new members of the team through our efforts.”
In terms of innovation, Dave said there were some key ways we can all introduce it into our work.
“If you put citizens or business at the centre, and work from their perspective – ask: Will this make life easier? Will this drive a better market outcome? – then often the improvements flow from there. Also it’s about using data to understand what it is you’re trying to fix, scanning the horizon to predict emerging issues before they hit, and having a clear drive and purpose to make our city one that is safe and vibrant.”
A flying start to a connected capital
Direct international flights
VisitCanberra led the work to bring international airlines into our city. This endeavour’s first huge success was on 21 September 2016, when the first Singapore Airlines flight landed in Canberra. The airline now has daily services to and from Canberra.
Securing Singapore Airlines opened Australia’s capital city to the world and established Canberra Airport as a global transport hub. The connection has accelerated the opportunity to grow exports, tourism and investment to the city and enables the community of Canberra and the region to access Singapore Airlines’ global network.
On 12 February 2018, Canberra welcomed a second international airline, Qatar Airways, when it started daily flights from Doha to Canberra, via Sydney. This service represents an opportunity to grow awareness of Canberra and the region to connecting destinations throughout Europe.
Canberra is now a globally connected city. We currently have 14 international flights per week landing at Canberra Airport.
International flights have resulted in record growth in international visitor numbers, with a record 252,000 international overnight visitors contributing $686 million to the ACT economy, according to Tourism Research Australia’s International Visitor Survey for the year ending December 2018.
And the work continues, with Visit Canberra actively pursuing opportunities to grow new international and domestic routes.
Digital Backpack for Students
The Digital Backpack is an online portal for ACT government students and teachers that provides access to tools to support teaching and learning, anytime and anywhere the internet is available.
The Backpack gives Canberra’s public students access to a range of online tools for learning and classroom collaboration, including over 2,000 e-books and the full suite of Microsoft Office365 products. It also includes links to resources and assistance on cyber security, to help educate students and their parents and carers about staying safe online.
The Digital Backpack was first conceived as part of a plan to modernise the use of IT in Canberra’s public schools; to ensure our students have equitable access to modern technology. A key driver of the program is the belief that all students should be able to learn anywhere, rather than be restricted to just one location. With a Digital Backpack, students can essentially carry their classroom around!
To further support the "Learn, Anywhere" initiative in our high schools, the Education Directorate offers a Chromebook to all public secondary students for use in school and at home. Google itself has recognised the success of the program in the ACT, highlighting the Directorate as a world leader.
You can find out more about the Digital Backpack program on the ACT Education Directorate’s website.
Innovation in demand for on-demand transport
While drivers in other Australian states and territories faced fines and rego suspensions for offering "illegal ride sharing services," the ACT welcomed this new form of transport that can be summoned on demand.
In 2015, we became the first jurisdiction in Australia and the first capital city in the world to pass regulation that legalised this ‘disruptive' business model.
At the time, Uber wrote in a blog post: "The ACT Government has not only answered the demands from thousands of Canberrans for economic opportunities and more reliable and affordable transport, but, through their decision, they have also recognised the rights of all Australians to choose how they move around their cities."
With a goal of increasing travel options for Canberrans, reducing fares through competition and driving further innovation in the on-demand transport industry, CMTEDD's Policy and Cabinet Division (PCD) found ways to cut red tape for the traditionally highly-regulated taxi industry.
A review two years after the regulation came into effect found passengers had warmly welcomed the changes, turning to on-demand transport in greater numbers than ever before. Instead of one form of on-demand transport subsuming the others, the pie had grown overall.
Throughout the reform processes, including numerous rounds of industry and community consultation, PCD paid particular attention to the accessibility needs of Canberrans and visitors, to ensure Wheelchair Accessible Taxi services continue to be available, of high quality, and sustainable as industry participants.
Reform work continues today, to level the playing field between different forms of on-demand transport, provide quality services to passengers and encourage competition and innovation in the industry.
You can follow the latest in on-demand transport reforms on the YourSay website.
Sparking innovation with streetlights
In 2014, a group of people in Treasury, in close collaboration with the then Territory and Municipal Services Directorate, embarked on a journey to find the best way to lighten the load of one of our often overlooked public assets: the ACT’s streetlight network.
Streetlights: we all notice when they are out. But do we really know how much work goes into keeping them on? Transport Canberra and City Services owns more than 80,000 lights on streets, footpaths, arterial roads and in various public parks and other open spaces around the ACT.
Public lighting is the ACT Government’s highest use of electricity (25 per cent) and produces 18 per cent of the Government’s greenhouse gas emissions. So when it came time to review how we managed them, we had to ensure it was done in a way that was smart and energy efficient.
The project team decided to use this opportunity to implement a non traditional, innovative approach to how the public service engages with industry, to get the best approach.
The issue wasn’t simple. Just think about the practical requirements, legal access issues, boundaries and the sheer amount of wiring involved, as well as the interface with electricity distribution.
To start the project with a collaborative approach, Treasury established a cross-directorate working group, which connected with other governments both in Australia and overseas to learn from their experiences and engaged with industry to better understand the options and opportunities.
Based on these learnings, the working group advised that tenderers be allowed freedom to be creative in framing their proposals and how they would demonstrate value for money, rather than explicitly prescribing the approach or deliverables from the procurement.
It was a multi-stage procurement process. The Government initially sought expressions of interest from industry to gauge the range of options available, which informed the way forward. The working group then worked with shortlisted tenderers, taking a hands-on approach through a detailed facility study, which allowed direct inspection of assets. This enabled tenderers to better understand our streetlight network, and for the procurement team to observe the capability and capacity of the tenderers before selecting the successful tenderer.
The result? In April 2018, the ACT became the first jurisdiction in Australia to engage a provider under an Energy Performance Contract for a streetlight network management contract. It incorporated a focus on three key outcomes: keeping the lights on, improving energy efficiency, and implementing smart digital communications technology. The ground breaking approach of the ACT was recognised by the Commonwealth Department of the Environment and Energy.
This innovative project was a shining example of the power of collaboration and creativity in how the public service can provide services to the community and will deliver a bright outcome for Canberrans through significant improvements to this critical municipal service.
In recognition of the brilliant effort across directorates, including three governance groups with more than 20 people across government over the course of the project, the working group was awarded the 2016 CMTEDD staff award for collaboration.
Reverse auction success breaks all records
In 2012, we had a challenge: to decarbonise our electricity supplies while keeping costs low. The solution developed by EPSDD was a new kind of renewable energy contracting mechanism: a reverse auction feed-in tariff scheme building on world best practice.
And wow was it successful! Every auction broke new records for low cost renewables. At the end of 2015, every wind farm under construction in Australia was supported by the ACT scheme. The ACT became home to the largest solar farms in the country at the time, while supporting wind farms in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria—and becoming a renewable energy investment hub.
The four auctions between 2012 and 2016 secured 40MW of solar capacity and 600MW of wind capacity: enough renewable electricity to reach our goal for the ACT to be powered by 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2020.
The reverse auctions program showed for the first time that sub-national governments could work with industry to drive investment in renewable energy, while limiting costs to consumers.
In 2012, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said that large scale solar could never be built at the record low contract price of $186/MWh. One year later, we proved it could be done at the Royalla Solar Farm.
This success hasn’t gone unnoticed. Other state and territory governments are adopting the ACT’s approach. And the team’s incredible work was recognised with a 2017 public sector innovation award. What is really remarkable is that all this was delivered by a small team, while other jurisdictions that have adopted our policies have required several dozen—over 80 staff in Victoria are working on its reverse auction program! This goes to show that small teams combined with a strong vision can make a huge difference, in this case transforming Australia’s renewable energy policy landscape. Find out more about how the reverse auctions work.
Getting on board with Public Private Partnerships
The City to Gungahlin light rail project has broken new ground by not only changing the way we work, live and connect, but through the use of a large-scale Public Private Partnership (PPP).
The financial arrangement that underpinned the light rail was the largest value PPP ever embarked upon by the ACT Government. It was also the most significant transport infrastructure project ever undertaken in the ACT and single biggest investment by the Territory since self-government.
When ACT Government staff initially began project planning for light rail, they looked at the many and varied ways such a huge project could be delivered. After much consideration, a PPP arrangement was recommended where the government would procure a private consortium to design, construct, finance, maintain, and operate the project.
The ACT Government had never built or operated a rail system before and one of the major benefits of the PPP model was that it would involve sharing risks with a private partner. Moreover, the partner would have expertise in managing rail system risks and an enhanced capacity to achieve the best value for money. Whole-of-life cost savings would also be optimised by having the private sector involved in all stages of the project.
In 2016, the ACT Government entered into the PPP arrangement with the Canberra Metro consortium for the City to Gungahlin Light Rail project for both the delivery of the light rail and its operation and maintenance for the following 20 years.
The first light rail service was launched on 20 April 2019 and the project has been extremely successful.
In the final delivery report, the Chair of the Light Rail Project Board, John Fitzgerald, said that it was evident that the chosen PPP delivery model had been successful.
He had high praise for the team delivering the project: The project team within Transport Canberra have also worked exceptionally hard to deliver this project. They have embraced every challenge and continually sought new and innovative solutions. It is obvious to me that they genuinely care about achieving the best possible outcome for Canberra and I am proud to have worked with them.
Construction of light rail started with the Capital Metro Agency and continued through the Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate. Mr Fitzgerald acknowledged how much the project touched the wider ACTPS, with support from the broader Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate, the Chief Minister, Treasury and Economic Development Directorate, the Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development Directorate, the City Renewal Authority and the Suburban Land Agency. Today, Major Projects Canberra is delivering future stages of light rail in close cooperation with the Transport Canberra and City Services Directorate and other Directorates.