The Country Towns Water Supply and Sewerage Program has effectively promoted adoption of better management practices by local water utilities, but will not achieve its objective of eliminating the water supply and sewerage infrastructure backlog in urban areas of country NSW.
 
The $1.2 billion Program aims to help local water utilities provide appropriate, affordable, cost effective and well-managed water supply and sewerage services in the urban areas of country NSW. It has two broad elements:

• promoting adoption of better practices 
• providing financial assistance towards the capital cost of infrastructure backlog works.

Parliamentary reference - Report number #251 - released 4 May 2015

The Department’s framework for VET reform has the potential to effectively achieve the government’s immediate objectives for the reform, which are associated with meeting its commitments under the National Partnership Agreement for Skills Reform without spending more. We found that the government is addressing VET reform objectives in the following order of priority: no extra cost (budget neutrality), TAFE viability, quality VET, access to VET for regions and equity groups, more contestability, student choice. Overall, we conclude that a more balanced approach, by putting more emphasis on increased contestability and student choice, is more likely to maximise the public value for the government’s investment in VET.

Parliamentary reference - Report number #249 - released 29 January 2015

In our view, the agencies we studied cannot be sure that the grants they allocate align with their corporate objectives, and that program outcomes are achieved. This is mainly due to problems with grant selection and the evaluation of results. It was good to see that most of the grants programs had funding objectives which were fairly clear. But we found problems across most programs which could affect the fair and equitable selection of grants, such as, often no procedures for assessing applications, no assessment guidelines for advisory committees, often no clear rationale for assessments and poor documentation of the reasons for decisions.

Parliamentary reference - Report number #104 - released 4 December 2002