It was profiled in the Minister’s remarks today, so somewhere there’s a missing $350,000 here from the budget, I would assume. But it is a proposal and I guess I’ll just go ahead and talk about it a little bit here.
I am a little bit uncomfortable with that. The thing about the Executive is that they do deal with all aspects of government, as do non-governmental organizations. They deal with all areas of government and some non-government areas, of course. But MACA has, in the past, mostly focused on sport and NGOs that work in sport, so I think we would be losing something in the transfer from Executive to MACA. We have had some communications between Members and committee and the Premier on this, and I think that’s a good process to have. As I’m sure the Premier knows, the voluntary sector is an extremely critical part of good governance and it’s very appropriate to have that in a department that is playing a leadership role for the government. It brings that recognition to it. By shifting this to MACA it puts a different light on it and so I just wanted to express that.
I’d appreciate any response, obviously, on this, but that’s not something I support. I don’t know where others are on that, but I hope there’s room to talk about that and discuss that before we go ahead with it. I’ll leave it at that.