Thank you, Chair.
Thank you to the Auditor General for her important work on this subject.
My questions will be directed at the officials.
Obviously this report is profoundly disappointing. This government has, with great fanfare, tried to rebrand some of the efforts that actually started under the previous government related to improving the lives of women and girls around the world. A government that is actually serious about making the lives of women and girls around the world better would be interested in bothering to measure outcomes as part of their policy indicators. That should be a pretty basic thing. If ministers, staff and the government are actually saying this isn't just about politics and they're actually trying to make people's lives better, then they would insist on the measurement and tracking of results.
Unfortunately, the government has clearly not done that. After eight years of lots of talking about feminism and a feminist international assistance policy, we find out that the government has loved to talk about it in a domestic context, but has not in fact been asking the right questions or putting in place the mechanisms to link their actions with outcomes.
To the officials, before us today you're even saying contradictory things, as far as I understand it. On the one hand, you are telling us that you take the work of the Auditor General seriously, but on the other hand, you are asserting that the work you have done has been making a tangible impact. The Auditor General's work says that you do not know if you are making a tangible impact because your policy indicators are not actually linked to outcomes.
How can you sustain the position, sir, that you take seriously the findings of the Auditor General while continuing to say that you know things that in fact, based on the data, you don't know?