 Good morning everybody. I always feel after lunch is hard, after a minister is always interesting. And I said to Andrew as he left, I don't think the ACNC is dead just yet. So hopefully we can still keep some of the reforms that have benefited the sector. I want to start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land where we meet. I want to thank Natalie and Robert and others for today. I think this is a pretty important kind of meeting because not many jurisdictions are actually engaging in the way that I see happening here. And although some of the conversations can be a bit uncomfortable at some level, I think it's very important to have those conversations. Because one of the things I find is that as a sector we tend to be so busy achieving our goals, serving our clients and our community that we really don't put our future and our intray to the degree that perhaps we should. So I'm going to run very quickly through the CCA some trends and talk to you about where I think we're going and what that means. So let me start very quickly by, does this work? Am I going to go backwards? Okay, so that's where I work. The Community Council for Australia. It's a peak body. It represents the not-for-profit sector. It's the first time we've had a peak body across the sector. And that's my board just to give you a sense of who's involved in that organisation. I'd encourage you all to join, become part of it in the discussions and things that we have. But I think one of the things we as a sector need to recognise is that we haven't operated much as a sector. So despite where we are and our role in our community, I don't think we've taken a very effective position and strengthened our sector. So having done the CCA stuff really quickly, let me go into where we are. We've been very fortunate in some ways as a sector. We've been growing faster than any other sector except the mining industry over the past decade. And in fact, our turnover has gone from about 46 billion to around 100 billion in less than six years. So most of us, most of the people sitting in this room, have seen an increase in their income and an increase in their capacity to do things. And generally we've had a pretty good time of it. In some ways that's a real problem and we'll get to that in a minute. But I remember when I first took over the role at CCA, we tried to get a senate inquiry. We actually got up a senate inquiry into future funding of the not-for-profit sector. And because we thought that was one of the most important agendas, we helped write the terms of reference, had the senate setup inquiry. If this had been the future financing of an industry a quarter of our size, like the tourism industry or communications or primary industry, you would have had hundreds if not thousands of submissions. Guess how many we had? 27. And three of those were from me. One as CCA and two in my, I'd written articles for the Canberra Times and the Secretary of the Committee wanted to quote from them. So, despite our size and our incredible economic footprint and our impact on the community, we really haven't been a very effective or strong advocacy group. We've already heard a lot about government trends and I think Andrew's laid them out pretty clearly. But I just thought I'd very quickly talk about some of the implications for that happening around Australia. Obviously, people want to not just have government money going to things, but we're possible attract other sorts of money and look at paying a dividend on the savings to government back to investors. And that kind of model is starting to be rolled out in a number of places in a number of different ways. The whole concept of attracting new money is usually associated with scale, with size, with people being able to join together. It's very hard to get sponsorship for one school, but getting sponsorship for 30 schools is a bit easier because of the way scale works in terms of investment thinking. There's a lot of place-based, you know, what's happening in this area. I was talking to Natalie before about the growing impact of geomapping where people look at given areas and say, look, what's happening here? And they overlay all these variables. The most impressive one I saw recently was they overlaid how far people had to walk to get to a grocery store in a part of the US. They overlaid that against diabetes and obesity and found a very strong correlation. I think it was Arkansas government actually sponsored a few supermarkets to open and very significantly reduced obesity, diabetes and increased school attendance by making walkability, how far they had to walk to get to fresh food, a different measure. So people are looking more at how do we get a return on our investment? What's actually happening with this population group? You know, the days of, you know, there's some kind of problem out here. People are injecting on the street out here. We should do something about that. Let's have an anti-injecting in front of the press club program. You know, we would lobby government to get it up and then, you know, we have the anti-injecting in front of the press club grant program of 100 grand a year. We all write submissions. Whoever writes the prettiest submission with the most references gets the 100 grand. You run the program for a while and then you write the project epita. Here lies that we did good program. It did good for a while and then it exists no more, but it was good while it lasted. And, you know, there's a lot of that kind of pattern in our history. There's going to be less of that kind of pattern in our future because of these reasons. Governments have left some money. That kind of responding to issues in that way. You know, now governments would say, well, who else? Who invests in those people? What other programs do we have? Why aren't they at school? Why aren't they in the various treatment programs or whatever they should be in? I don't know that I did that, but it came up. Can we stop that? I'm not actually touching this, but... Should I quit? I wanted to... What am I doing wrong? It's upside down. Okay, that helps. But I still wasn't touching it. I wanted to talk about what I see is really important for us to understand about who we are. And I don't know. I know I'm getting older, but increasingly when I watch television and things like that and I look at the best communicators in the world, I wonder what the bloody hell they're communicating because I watch these ads and I don't know what the product is. You know, there's people hugging each other and it's a health or people learning to play the piano and it's a bank. You know, it makes no sense to me what they were doing and I'd be looking at these ads and thinking, what are they doing? And then I realise what they're actually doing is trying to lay out a set of values that we can align ourselves to. And this has gone to what I consider to be extraordinary lengths. And I could have shown you any number of these. You know, I think the best social inclusion ad I've ever seen is the VB ad, where they say what banner do you march under and they have all these different banners, half of which I think I qualify for. And they have token people that aren't attractive or people that are too attractive or people that are gay and people that are streakers and people that are brewers and people, you know, and you can make up your own banner and go on the website and make up your own, the David Crosby banner, you know, and you can form a group. And it's, we all belong because we're all having a beer. And, you know, if I say to you, let's go have a beer, what does it mean? There's a set of values associated with that sense of irreverence, fun, relax, don't take yourself too seriously. It's not an accident. That happens around that product. Because that's part of what we've created. But this whole notion of values, I think, has gone to an extreme level. I'd give you just one example. Now, let's see if this works. There's no sound. Doesn't matter. We don't, we don't really need the sound. But there's creepy music. I should really play something, but there's no, well, I want you to try and think about who might have made this ad. So, so he's come home late, he's been out graffiting, the music's all sad. He's got this sister that's really sick. So the mother says, thank you. Pfizer. Who got that? And you gotta imagine there was swelling music and beautiful emotional stuff. Hopefully the next day we can get the sound to work on. But, you know, Pfizer are probably one of the worst companies in the US for, you know, misrepresenting their drugs, creating diseases for their drugs and behaving in a really inappropriate way. And they're doing this, it takes more than, you know, if I look at some of these ads, I'm just, I can't believe that the people making the ads are actually the companies that they are. So why are they doing it? These are the best minds in our world creating this kind of communication. The skill in that's phenomenal. They're doing it for the same reason that when you and I walk into any service, what do we do? When we look around, what are we doing? We're reading it. And what are we reading? If I walk into a primary school, it doesn't matter what, but if I walk into a primary school and I look around, what am I reading? I'm looking at how people are interacting. I'm looking at whether, you know, when the teacher comes out, does she bend down or squat down with the kids? Do the kids come closer or move away? Do the kids look as though they're in trouble when the teacher starts to talk to them? Or do they gather around and think it's fantastic? I'm reading it. I'm reading the values that are being enacted. Is there these kinds of things? So yeah, that's just, yeah, maybe it's a delay. When I walk into any service, whether it's aged care or mental health or alcohol and drugs and, you know, I run programs in all those areas, run agencies in those areas, I look at what's happening. And what's happening for me is about, are these values there? And the reason I work in this sector and the reason I believe in this sector is not because it makes money or employs people. It's because I believe in those values. And I want to see those values enacted. You know, I would worry Andrew, if serve court gets a lot of your contracts because I'm not sure about the values that are being enacted in some of the services. I look for values in organisations. And I see values as part of what we should be measuring and talking about. Often we don't. Too often we don't. It's already there. I didn't do that. Who said that? Oh, hi. I didn't know you were doing it. You should have told me. I'll wave to you. Okay. What worries me about our sector is this, that as we've grown, we've grown quite quickly remember, many of us have grown in a way that most businesses would see as remarkable. We've started to take on some of these kinds of traits in some organisations. So I could talk about some of the organisations I've been because Rosemary mentioned Odyssey House in Melbourne. Odyssey is a very big treatment service over 100 staff, major programs in the community over 40 residential places in the community, 100 bed residential longer term treatment program, a farm and all these other things. When I got there, I did what all new CEOs do, you know, I did a kind of review where we were. And when I got the senior staff and some of the board together to talk about the outcome of my review, this was 2000 when I first got there. But 350 heroin deaths in Melbourne that year, we were meant to be dealing with most of the heroin treatment in Victoria. And quite a few of those heroin deaths were Asian young men in their 20s. We didn't have one Asian client in the 5000 clients that I checked, not one. And I said to them, how come we don't have any Asian clients? Now, it wasn't the only thing I raised, but it was one of the points I made. How come we don't have any Asian clients? And you know what they said? They don't come. And, you know, Dave, we're not going to go looking for business. They're awaiting this for all our programs. Why would we go out trying to get extra people in? You know, people die on our waiting list. What are we going to do? And the whole notion that they were there to serve a community and respond to an issue had been lost in the notion that they will stand and deliver program providers. This is what we do. They come or they don't. Are we serving our community? Well, why would you ask that question? Our programs are full, we get money. Increasingly what I see is people are disconnected from their purpose, from their core values. I won't go through what we did about that, but suffice to say, we out based the quick summaries, we out based some staff in places where there were large populations of Asian people, including the Buddhist temple in Footscray and ended up with a lot of Asian clients. But what I see too often in our sector is a kind of stand and deliver mentality. What do we do? We run our programs. That's what we do. And we've got to get more money to run our programs. Why? Because people benefit from our programs. How are you serving your community? How could it be done better? If someone took away all that program funding, all of it, and said to you, I want you to address this issue, would you do what you do now? Would you do it the way you do it? Or would you do it differently? Would you start at a different point? If you didn't have to have a unit price or a unit cost, it's not, I'm not trying to have a go at people because what we've done is respond to the environment in which we're operating. In order to offer new programs and new services when we could see needs, we often had to fit them into boxes of service delivery and unit prices and things like that. But there comes a time, I think, when we have to think, go back to our purpose. So, good. See that? That worked. There's no sound again. So, I don't know why we got no sound. You're fixing it. Okay. There's a guy up there. You think I'm talking to myself, but there's a guy up behind that window. It really doesn't matter. I can do the voices. Okay. So, they're going up in Escalator. And then the Escalator stops with a real shout. You should have heard that was a real shout out. And they're upset. She says, this is terrible. I'm going to be late for my meeting. He says, don't worry. Something will happen. Then they're looking for their phones. They realise they're on their desk. What are they going to do? They're calling out help. And he's saying, we're stuck on an Escalator. Will someone come and help us? And she's being really calm. And then she freaks and just screams. And you can see they're showing shots of stairs everywhere. I don't know why they're doing that. And then he's complaining about what it will mean for his day. He's stuck on this bloody Escalator. And then he says, well, I guess there's not much to do, but wait till help comes. And then help arrives. And he's really happy. He's here to fix it. Isn't this great? I wish I could do his voice, actually fantastic voice. And then, guess what happens? Escalator gets stuck. I think we've been on an Escalator as a sector. And our capacity to think differently about how we move forward is really challenging. And it's something that we haven't had to do, because just doing good work was enough. Doing good work was enough. You got your funding again, write a few submissions. The money came. That time is changing. So next, I probably should stop doing this. When we as CCA went around and talked to CEOs in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide about where they saw the future and what the issues were, we were thinking, well, if the sector won't put its future in its injury, maybe we need to start looking at how we do that. How do we talk about the future for our sector? And what are the issues in our future? So after quite a bit of consultation, actually supported by Price of What Hours Coopers, or PWC, as we have to call them now, these are the five key things that emerged with all this, some of whom have done remarkable work. As Simon Rosenberg was saying before, government needs to rethink the way it invests in the sector. I mean, it's really interesting to me, if I invest in the stock market, not that I do, very really. I'm not sure that I've actually got any shares my wife has. I'm not sure what they're in. But if we invest in the stock market, what do we do? What do we look at? Well, you look at the kind of management team that they have, their past record. You look at who else is invested. You look at the price earnings return. You look at their business model. Are there potential competitors? What's their unique positioning compared to their competitors? And if all those things are right and the earnings look solid and they're well capitalised, then you might invest. I've never been asked those questions as an offer profit. I've never been asked about my capital reserves. I've never been asked about my management team and their experience. I've never been asked about a forward plan for how our organisation is going to function. I've never been asked if I've done this before in other organisations. We write the pretty submissions or proposals in the government because that's the prettiest one they have. You can have the hundred thousand. You wrote a really nice submission. I don't like that. The government needs to and other funders need to think again about how we invest. Increasingly, we need to look at our access to capital. It has to be outside of government increasingly, whether we like it or not because government is under the pump. Revenue increases because government's had the same thing. It's had an increasing revenue stream. It's levelled out. It hasn't gone backwards but it's levelling out. The increase has stopped. Andrew could probably give us the figures. So where is capital for our sector? Firstly, we have a lot of capital that we don't leverage in our own assets. I know this because at Odyssey we had a $20 million property. 40 acres on the arrow. I couldn't leverage it. I had a head kicking board of business people. The head of Channel 9, RACV, Energy Australia, Mackenzie graduates. On my board, it was a real heavy hitting business board. People who worked with the Packers. When I said, why don't we leverage this property that we have to create some money for us and invest? Oh, no. We spent a long time building up these assets. We don't want to risk them. At the Mental Health Council of Australia, I built up a reserve of over a million dollars, which was where I was immediately prior to this. I wanted to invest the part of that million dollars that wasn't essential for our core operating. And we had a former health minister on our board and other people. And I said, look, I think we need to develop an investment strategy and I bought in investment advisors. You know what we ended up doing? We put it in government bonds. Of course, yeah, we've got to keep it safe, David. We can't afford to think like that. And there's other capital. There's superannuation funds. There's people looking for returns. There's, we're increasingly looking at how we access money that's in the sort of lost money kind of accounts and things like that. We've got to think differently about how we access capital. We need to measure. Don't tell me how many beds you had occupied or how many clients you saw or how many people participated in your program. So what? When I go to the States and talk to Not-for-Prophet See, they have this fantastic narrative about their agencies. They're able to talk about them in meaningful terms about what they achieve in a way that I find is often lacking in Australia. We do not talk about our success very well. We don't measure it very well and we don't talk about it very well. We tend to express our needs in terms of negative values rather than, you know, here's the problem isn't a terrible kind of talk, rather than here's the solution. Look at what we've done. Look at what we can do. I used to run these focus groups at Odyssey, well I didn't. They were run by Sweeney Research, who did at Pro Bono, run these focus groups with people because I wanted to know what the profile of Odyssey House was. I've got to get private funding. I need to know where we're positioned. They'd run these focus groups. I'd sit in another room having a pizza and a beer and watch people in these focus groups and they'd write them up and they'd break down the focus groups and we'd do this every six months to a year and we'd look at our profile, what people thought about our organisation and we'd look about how the messaging around that might or might not be strong or weak. We'd actually do the work and I can tell you that drug treatment wasn't particularly popular but finding people jobs and those achieving that kind of economic outcome, surprisingly it was very important to people at community level more than we thought. So the fact that we created new jobs for people and became an RTO and those kinds of things was much more important than the fact that we provided drug treatment. And you start to think about why that is and the messaging and how you need to communicate it. We raised over a million dollars a year because we were careful about how we did it and we invested in it. But measurement is critical at all levels and without measurement how can you reward success? We've got to stop kidding ourselves that we can all exist as little islands and we need to look at collaboration. We need to look at the kinds of back office mergers. We need to look at merging around our campaigns or around our fundraising or around other things. We're just you know it's just silly not to. You know in business if I see two companies company A and company B and I can see that if we can combine them we'll make a bigger profit. I can make a lot of money. There are a lot of people making a lot of money doing exactly that going around and looking at where they can get this company and that company put them together and create a bigger profit margin and on that basis they can bring these companies together they can buy them both out or present mergers or options or and I'll get a percentage of the increased profit. That's how a lot of people get very rich. In our sector if I see two organisations doing similar work in similar ways with back offices and everything that are unproductive you know and I want to put them together what incentive is there? If I can show they provide better services to that community who are our intermediaries? Intermediaries in the business world make a lot of money. Intermediaries in our world barely exist. It's a handful and I'm not sure that anyone's actually doing that work looking at where organisations are and how they could be more effective not in terms of financial benefit but in terms of better services to the people they're meant to be serving. Remember the original purpose the original values what you're there for. We also need to look at how we develop ourselves our organisations our leadership our capacity some not-for-profit to manage by the last man standing and often is a man you know the person that stayed around the longest knows the programs that might be all right but they need to be invested in so they can become people who understand a kind of forward plan and how to develop it and implement it not just how to run their programs. We go to the next one I'm almost finished so I'm just going to sum up with two quick overheads. I've always thought that what we do is incredibly valuable and that's why I've stayed in the sector all my life really and but I've also felt that we have a responsibility to do more than just do good work because if we do good work it's not enough I learned that very early and I'll tell you one story about time Rosemary tell one story three minutes okay I'll tell it really quickly many years ago I was working with kids who'd been expelled from schools in the western suburbs of Melbourne I was teaching in a school called Williamstown Tech next to the rifle range and I had all these 15-year-old kids about 15 of them and you know they were real pains in the a** kids who'd been kicked out of schools and I was running this program with this old crusty sheet metal worker from the docks who'd become a sheet metal teacher and we'd set up a farm and a kitchen and other things we were making an active learning and we managed to get the kids there every day and because we got the kids there every day the school got paid extra money so they'd pay our salaries so they were happy to have us and I read a book by a guy called Art Pearl American Education Professor I'd read you know always kept reading most of the books about troubled young people about you know redefining the nature of the problem you know you read these books and you know are they school truants are they school refusers are they school you know psychosis people or are they who gives the stuff they don't go to school you know what are you going to do about it and not many books actually focus on the what you do about it they focus on the redefining the problem but this book was all about what you do so I wrote him a little note saying thanks this first book I've read that's actually about solutions for these kinds of kids I work in William Sound I do this it's less than a page the letter he wrote back saying I want to come and watch you teach and I was a bit sort of gum you know he's an American professor I'm coming to Australia I'm going to come and watch you teach and you know there's a long story here but the short story is it became a really big deal you're morning tea comes down to teach I'm not stupid I'd practice my lesson I knew what was going to happen it was going to be really good I start teaching this lesson this little bastard of a kid bursts in he'd just been in Toronto in those days when kids have problems they'd lock you up for three weeks to assess you because you're unstable in your home environment so to assess you they had to lock you up and there weren't many places to lock you up except youth training centers so he'd been locked up in a youth training center where they assessed him after getting into trouble with the police on a stating you know and so the other kids couldn't have given the stuff about what I wanted to talk about or you know my lesson and I could see it just going but being the gifted teacher I thought I was I thought I'll make this kid the centre so I had him I don't know whether you've worked with kids like that they're not very verbal you know if you ask them do something they don't want to do or they think it's unfair they don't say David that's an inappropriate assignment of work tasks they just don't say that they say other things that people might be offended by so but these kids are fantastic at reading environments better than me drug users are better than me at reading environments they go bang and they read it so these kids are really good at context setting so I had him set up this whole children's court because he'd just come from the children's court that morning and he set it up and we had a case and I won't go through all the details but he did it right it was actually a children's court with all the players he directed the more appropriately I thought it was a fantastic lesson because these kids and it might be useful for them had learned about the children's court and how it operates and the roles of all the different people and he'd done it really well you know I thought it was a fantastic educational experience another example of my gifted teaching in a problem situation Art Pearl big American guy stands up in front of them at the end of the lesson and can I have him yeah yeah yeah what'd you learn today nothing we just mucked around with David that's why we come because when you go to school you don't have to do any work you just get to muck around with David said thanks sat down I stood up and said you little bastards if I'd given you a book on the children's court and made you read chapter one and answer 20 questions and read chapter two and answer 20 questions and read would you have done work yes would you have learned something yes but you didn't today no we mucked around as we walked down the corridor Art Pearl says big guys call his arm around my shoulder he um he said to me uh what are those kids doing now I said well they're out in the playground creating bugger even you know said what are they saying said what what do you mean he said what are they saying when people ask them what they've been doing and I thought about it said that they just muck around with David he said okay so what are they saying to other kids said they just muck around with David what are they saying when the teachers come over they just muck around with David what are they saying when they get home they just muck around with David he said you are doing some of the most valuable work I've seen and you are the most vulnerable program I have ever been to you know why no one values you even your clients don't value you they just muck around with David and I'm telling you that story because emotionally it was very difficult for me to learn that and I had to change what I did I had to measure what happened with those kids I had to report and I had to build a support network in my school I created the curriculum initiatives group and I did a whole lot of things to address it I compared the outcomes of those kids to other kids expelled in the region and showed how effective we were and I've never forgotten that because it hurt it really hurt so I'm saying to you doing good work is not enough you have to create values around what you do so my last slide is that the last slide no it's one more isn't it thank you um where things are going to change they've always been changing our sector but they're going to change more now because of the way the external environment is operating um I want you never to forget what you're there for that sense of values and purpose and even if things are going to go bad please make that the purpose because we as a sector will be stronger if we do um and even if we go through ups and downs we want to do it on the basis that we're serving our community not trying to make money or trying to be something that we're really not um and I want you to tell your stories I want you to to have a voice it's not just about whether you support or don't support a government policy position it's about what you achieve and why that's important and how you want to achieve that more I want you to be an advocate for what you do because if you're an advocate for what you do just as if I've been an advocate for those kids those kids would have felt better about what they're doing their families would have felt better about what they're doing I would have felt better about what I was doing my school would have felt better about what I was doing my community would have felt better about what I was doing and because I wasn't doing that those things were not happening I want you to become advocates and I also want you to support advocacy. And most importantly, I want you to make sure that you both do good work and that you have your work value. Thank you. Thanks, David. I think you've talked to us about really important issues, not just of values, but of congruence between values and delivery and people's experience of but also in terms of the dynamic ways in which even in a world where measures are imperfect of the kinds of things that can happen in the social sector, we need to find intelligent and consistent ways of telling the story that are rigorous and that demonstrate the value that is created. I was reminded listening to some of what you said over the speech that Sir Ronald Cohen, with whom I'm privileged to do some work, made just recently at the mansion house in London. Sir Ronald has been leading work in social finance for the last 15 years, following one of the most successful careers in venture capital. And he was reflecting that as he has been leading work in the social finance task force and other forums, that he's come to realise why he thinks we face some predicaments for the social sector. And he says the primary reason is that traditional philanthropy and sources of funding have focused on the act of giving rather than on achieving social outcomes. It's given charitable organisations money for two or three years and then told them as a sanity check they have to raise some more money elsewhere after that. And also reminded them that they shouldn't be wasting any of it on overheads. And yet he said if business entrepreneurs had come to him as a financier at APACS, his company, with business plans that involved investing nothing on overheads and the capacity of their business or on building strong executive teams, he would have shown them the door. That the combination of unpredictable funding and lack of investment capital has prevented many charitable organisations from realising their potential for effectiveness and scale. And I think David is reminding us this morning of that great potential and how beyond thinking about it in terms of business principles, really we're thinking about it in terms of discipline, in terms of value creation and in terms of the fantastic insights and dynamism the community sector can bring with its connection to people in place. Now David's happy to take some questions if there are people who'd like to ask something. We have one to start with. Hi David, Camilla Rowland, CEO of Karalike Programmes, fellow Dragon Alcohol Treatment Organisation. Many of us are looking to the future. We've been attending forums on mutuals and co-ops and learning about alternative business models. And there was one held last Monday here in the ACT sponsored by MECU. And Minister Andrews opened that. And at that opening he said we're going to be abolishing the ACNC and we're going to probably have a centre of innovation. Can you tell me what you believe will happen in terms of red tape? If that occurs? Look, I don't know whether people saw it. We wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister last week on the ACNC. I should declare an interest. I'm on the ACNC advisory board. And certainly my members are very strong supporters of the ACNC and I think the whole sector is. It's much better than the alternative being proposed which is actually the ATO. We don't want to be regulated by the ATO. We've had that and we end up in the high court trying to prove that we're charities over and over again. The ACNC has been doing I think fantastic work for our sector in a number of ways. And because of that, we have the support in the Senate not to have the ACNC abolished. And I expect we will have the support in the next Senate not to have it abolished. So we're continuing to talk to Minister Andrews and his chief of staff, Ted Lappkin. It's not a very fruitful discussion I'd have to say, but we're not prepared to say the ACNC is gone. And I think we as a sector shouldn't be prepared to say the ACNC is gone. I get tired of politicians standing up and saying they want to listen to the sector. And then when the sector speaks saying we disagree, we've got a policy decision, we're going to do what we want to do anyway. So for us, it's a very live issue supporting the ACNC. There's starting to be some concern in the coalition about the level of backlash around the ACNC. And we'll leverage that. When the ACNC legislation gets to the Senate, there'll be an inquiry because the senators can order an inquiry and we'll have a chance to again talk about its benefits for our sector. We all want a one stop shop. And what the minister was talking about in terms of having the ACT align its fundraising and registration and that with the ACNC makes perfect sense and was a good measure, has South Australia agreed to do. I don't know why anyone would want to undo it. Well, I do know. There are two core vested interests. One is the archdiocese of Sydney, who don't want any transparency. And the other is the financial services council of Australia, who are responsible for all the trustee companies that manage charitable trusts, and they don't want any transparency. Because charitable, the trustee companies are managing money of people who died. And often they're the sole trustees. And they're in a position where some of those trustees charge significant fees in perpetuity. So that continues on forever. They have this pool of money they can invest, they pay themselves investment fees, they have this pool of money they account for, they pay themselves accounting fees, their trustees under law and they pay themselves a trustee fee. And sometimes they pay themselves other fees for dispersing the money when they disperse it. And sometimes they don't disperse much. And, you know, this became an issue for us as an organisation, because some of our members who were the sole beneficiary of certain trustees. So the trustee had to give all their money to this particular charity. Found that their income was reduced by over 100,000 in one year when one trustee company decided to put its fees up. And we find it remarkable that they're allowed to get away with that kind of behaviour. So I noticed John Brogdon, the Financial Services Council came out in response to our media last week saying he posed it. And of course, the only other two people that came out were both from the Catholic Church. I don't think they're representing the whole sector would be my view. We've got a couple of other questions down in this part of the room. Things are going to the far side first and then we'll come back to this gentleman. Hi David, Susan Hillier from ACT Council of Social Service. I just had a couple of reflections on the material that you presented. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on those as one was around, we've had 10, 10 years or more of an expectation around not for profits starting to operate more through a market model and to engage more in market driven behaviours. And I think that's you talked about how that then challenges the values of organisations. I think it also sets up these kind of competing imperatives. And I think one of the parts of the conversation that I think needs more visibility is this year around market failure. So there's some real problems with the way markets operate, particularly for the people for whom a lot of our organisations have been established and for whom they operate. And so the assumption that adopting more market based approaches to things will improve our efficiency and our coherence and our strategic sustainability, I think is open to question. I think the other issue is around we've had lots of people who have an enormous amount of market experience. You talked about people that were on your board, heard about Aventure Capitalists, his work for 15 years. We haven't seen a lot of benefit come out of that in terms of really shifting the public's perception around what not for profits ought to be able to do and how they ought to be able to operate. There's a lot of discomfort with not for profits operating in ways and talking about their capital, talking about investment, talking about that. So that creates this tension, I think, in terms of organisations developing and moving on. The other reflection I would give is that I think in the ACT, we've actually worked really hard on setting ourselves up and the not for profit sector has led setting ourselves up for the future. So we've got the Community Sector Leaders Forum that is a self funded learning and development forum for senior executives in our sector and has focused really, certainly in the last 12 months, on looking at things like how do you raise in capital different ways of innovating and setting up business models. ACT cost runs the social impact measurement network. We have quite a lot of work that is done locally through that mechanism and quite a lot of leadership in this sector around measurement. And what we struggle with is a lack of government and funder willingness to engage with this on those areas of development. So I'm just interested to hear your views on those two issues. Well there's three issues. And the first one is no one favours a Darwinian approach to the not for profit sector, you know, survival of the fitters. I don't think the minister's saying that. I don't hear governments around Australia or even investors in the sector saying that. You know, I spent a lot of my time as head of the alcohol and other drugs council of Australia for seven years. You know, it's not a popular sector. People, for some reason, don't seem overly willing to provide funding to guys in tattoos and thongs who've been in prison compared to babies in humid crits. You know, it's not a level playing field in the sense of compassion out there. And, you know, there are a whole range of issues around survival of the fitters and what that means. But what I see is that the sector itself has also not been good at marketing what it achieves. And I think the measurement ties into that very well. We need to do measurement better. And, you know, a lot of the reason we haven't done measurement is because it was never useful to do measurement. No one ever didn't make any difference. Government gave money to people whether they were effective or ineffective. If you rent 10 beds and everyone got, you know, better or employed or got back with their families, that was great. If you rent 10 beds and none of that happened and all those people came back in two years, bad luck. You got the same money. Like there was no distinction. I remember when I first got to Odyssey and I started a leave as program because I couldn't believe the way people left. It was so bad, I thought. We'd had these people living there for a period of time and we hadn't developed proper reintegration programs. So we developed this leave as program that worked really well. And it meant that no one left for a while. So the department rang me up and said, we're going to cut your funding. I said, but we've been more, we've had more beds full, we've been busier than ever before. They said, no, you haven't had enough separations. None of the people have left. And in those days, they would pay me $10,000 for a residential episode of care, $10,000 per person. Whether they stayed four weeks or four years. I mean, no one stayed four years. We had one woman who had a baby twins there who stayed 18 months. The average length of day was 131 days. So they'd calculated that out, said you get $10,000 for every person. That's it. So I guess what some agencies did, they'd only have people for a certain period of time and then they'd get rid of them because they got the $10,000 that way. The way the system works promotes behaviour in our sector, that is not in our interests often. And so I think we have had to compete in ways that are counterproductive. And we have had that kind of sense of trying to get money through the ways that government and others provide money. But I can tell you that if you lift your sites beyond immediate funding to achieving a better outcome for your community, you will be in a stronger position with government in the future. Because ultimately governments have to respond to communities. And if you can show you're successful with people and that you rebuild communities and rebuild lives and achieve outcomes, regardless of who you're working with, you will get support. And that's been my experience. I think it's great that you've got a leaders forum. I think the more we can bring people in the not-for-profit sector together the better. Far too often we haven't been brought together and we've stayed in our silos. We need to get together more often. We need to develop our skills, share ideas, have arguments. And I do think this notion of competing needs to be not about competing for the money, but competing to achieve better outcomes. And using that as a rationale for decision making by you as an organisation and then presenting that to government rather than the other way around. Just very quickly take the last question of the gentleman who was waiting and then we I'm afraid we will need to move on. Thanks I've been partially presumed by the last questioner in the response. A message I believe you're putting across is that there's a great risk of the process of the product in it. Sorry I'm contetic. The process can become the end in itself. I have an actual revulsion to the use of word marketing in lots of literature relating to this. Marketing surely is oriented towards, not towards the consumer. Pfizer doesn't really care about the people who have taken the drug in Bangkok. It's about the producer. I think that's the wrong word. It leads, as has already been mentioned, to competition and in fact can become a major activity of the NFP is just competing there. Can we not get some other way which is focused on the what should the difference you're making not on the product you're producing and I mean the attitude of saying this is the product you produce you've got to use it. We want to encourage you to use it. Exactly the same as Pfizer or David Jones or Maya. I believe that marketing is not the inappropriate word to be used in any context with you. You can have evaluation of the worth of what someone's doing without having to look at it from a marketing point of view, look at it from the consumers point of view, not the market. Thanks. You look I agreed to a point. You don't have to call it marketing you can call it whatever you want but you want to be valued and if you believe I mean the whole point of me telling that story if I believe those kids are important if I believe that program I'm doing with those kids is important then I have to do more than just do the program. I have to create value around that. I have to have it valued by my peers. I have to have it valued by my clients. I have to have it valued by their parents and others and if you're not going to do that you will not survive. If you're not valued then you're vulnerable. You need to be valued and you should be valued but you've got to create value around what you're doing. You don't like the term marketing. Call it you know evaluation or creating value or whatever you want but you know at some point if people don't know the positive stories about who you are and what you do and they don't share those then you are vulnerable. We will need to hold it there and I'm sure you'll be able to catch catch David in one of the breaks later today. Will you join me please in thanking David?