In Principle
One-stop-shop to good governance
Good governance is at the heart of the public sector. It ensures a quality public sector that is efficient, effective, fair and transparent; and trusted by its customers – the wider community. Yet with the proliferation of applicable accountability requirements it is easy for agencies to get lost.
To help agencies find their way through the maze of mandatory requirements and obligations, OPSSC has developed the Good Governance Guide – helping you comply with the standards, which documents the across-government accountability requirements into a single framework.
The Guide is based on the governance concept adopted by the Australian Stock Exchange and has been developed in consultation with WA public sector agencies. It addresses the following nine key aspects of governance:
Helping to comply with the standards: OPSSC's Rebecca Harris and Paul Stafford review the components of the Good Governance Guide.
- Government and public sector relationship;
- Management and oversight;
- Organisational structure;
- Operations;
- Ethics and integrity;
- People;
- Finance;
- Communication; and
- Risk management.
For each area the Guide sets out the overarching principle and provides an operational matrix that helps to identify the applicable standard, how to achieve the standard, how to know whether the standard has been met, and how to report on compliance with the standard.
An additional important element of the Guide is the Accountability Map, which is an on-line tool that agencies can use to see applicable mandatory requirements and existing guidance documents at one glance. The Accountability Map will also help agencies to streamline their response to their accountability obligations.
Commissioner for Public Sector Standards Dr Ruth Shean said that OPSSC has already incorporated some of the elements of the Guide into OPSSC activities.
"We used the Guide during the redesign of our survey tools, in particular the CEO survey and the employee perceptions survey," Dr Shean said.
"By doing this we were able to see first hand the contribution that the Guide will make to streamlining governance and accountability requirements."