Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee [Part 2], , 1:51:23 to 1:53:30
The ANAO explains reductions in its performance audit targets due to resource constraints and the prioritization of climate-related audits.
Topics: Efficiency dividend, Climate change
Speakers: Dr Caralee McLiesh, Senator Susan McDonald
capacity and for each of the last four years and year to date how many has it conducted in each year?
So we have had to reduce the size of our performance audit program uh owing to uh to resource constraints. Uh in 2022 23 um we had uh uh a target of uh of um 48 performance audits. Um but we have lowered that target down to 38 to 42 uh performance audits per year. uh those are so around 40 audits to cover um the entire public sector. Um as a result of the reduction in the overall size of the program, we now typically conduct um around two climate change audits out of that um total of 40. So we seek to select um audits on the basis of uh of risk and um the ability to to impact to um to to to add value um to a topic. But we cannot cover um all uh government activity. We need to uh need to prioritize our our efforts.
>> So that would be 20 years at two a two a year, wouldn't it? If you were just to focus on 40 programs,
>> it would take us a long time to cover all of those uh programs. Senator, I would just um highlight that we do have dollar values for some of the initiatives in uh the uh the the report that we prepared, but that was really on the basis of the uh the the data on expenditure that was um that was publicly available. Not all initiatives had u publicly available expenditure data. Uh, and I'd also just um highlight that I think right now the most comprehensive tracker of um government climate policies is the um climate change authorities climate policy tracker. They last updated their uh list in 2025 and that um lists over 430 policies and actions uh and has links through to uh agency descriptions of those initiatives.