Media release from the office of Chief Minister Jon Stanhope reveals that the ACT has again shown that it is among the nation's top performers in key service areas measured in the Report on Government Services 2010 (ROGS). The report, released by the Productivity Commission, is an annual comparison of state and territory government services and confirmed that services in the ACT continued to perform well.

Among the main findings of the ROGS report were the following:   

• the Alexander Maconochie Centre showed high performance in key areas, well above the national average, for prisoner education and employment;
• community perceptions of safety and of police integrity continued to be very positive, with the ACT performing consistently above the national average for a variety of indicators;
• ACT public schools had the second-lowest student-to-teacher ratio in the country at 12.7, compared with the national average of 14.0;
• ACT mean scores and the proportion of students performing in the high achievement level for reading, writing and numeracy in 2008 and 2009 NAPLAN were among the highest in the country and within the three highest performing jurisdictions for all year levels;the ACT had the highest year 12 completion rates of all jurisdictions;
• there was a marked increase in the number of full-time nurses;
• there was a significant improvement in the number of public hospital beds per capita;
• the ACT has the highest breast screening rates for Indigenous women in the country;
• the ACT has the highest life expectancy rates at birth for men and women; and
• the ACT is most efficient jurisdiction in the completion of child protection investigations, with 67.3% finalised within 28 days, more than double the national average of 33.2%.

Mr Stanhope said the report contained a wealth of information that underlined the nation-leading and improving quality of the ACT's public services, such as

•  Improved access to elective surgery, where a total of 10,104 people accessed elective surgery in the ACT in 2008-09, up from 9,577 in 2007-08, it is the sixth year in a row in which the ACT has achieved record levels of access to elective surgery. 
•  The ACT also continues to treat all of the most urgent emergency department presentations (category one patients) on arrival and showed improvements across category two, three and four patients. 
• A higher percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students achieved above the national minimum standard in all tests and all year levels in NAPLAN 2009 when compared with the national results for Indigenous students. 
• The ACT also had the highest apparent retention rate of all jurisdictions from year 7 to 12 for full-time secondary students in public schools at 99.5 percent, while the national average was 70.1 percent.

Mr Stanhope said that the “Productivity Commission report represents an opportunity to recognise where we have performed well and to utilise the results to identify areas for future improvements, and that this Government will continue to work hard to ensure that the people of the ACT continue to have access to the highest quality services."