Mr. David Moloney:

From my Department's point of view, for equality and inclusion we run out equality budgeting and take responsibility for equality budgeting over Departments. That is supposed to tell us across public spending where money is going, focusing in particular on ten themes - gender, marital status, family status, age, disability, sexual orientation, race, religion, membership of Traveller and Roma communities and socioeconomic status. In some ways, in what we spend we try to capture some evidence of what impact we are having. It can be challenging. We can do it with income. We can do it through the SWITCH model and the ESRI with income. It can be harder to do with other investments, but we try to capture the income on that.

On our approach to consultation, I note the issue raised by the Senator and, in good practice consultation, part of that should be to find ways of linking in with those communities who might not otherwise be part of that consultation. We will give that some thought, both in terms of the consultation on the NDP and the infrastructure delivery piece we will engage on over the next couple of months. There are, of course, representative bodies and ways of doing that, so we should be able to do that.