Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Families and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, the concerns that were articulated by the Auditor-General were essentially this: no baseline data was collected about participants' behaviours. Therefore, at the end of the trial, because no adequate baseline data was collected, it was not possible to evaluate whether or not any changes to people's wellbeing had taken place as a consequence of your intervention. What you've told me is that you've got some better processes in place to gather information about cost. Okay; perhaps that is an improvement. But the core issue that we're trying to test here is whether or not an intervention of this kind makes people's lives better. What is the department doing, in this second evaluation that it has now commissioned, to make sure that that can be meaningfully evaluated? And, incidentally, you mentioned a commitment of funding. What funding has been committed to the second evaluation?