Page 3173 - Week 15 - Thursday, 14 December 1989
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Mr Whalan talked about rumours. The only rumours that I know about, Mr Speaker, are the ones started by the Labor Party maliciously and vexatiously. If they would stop the rumour mill, then the morale of the public service would be a lot better than it is today. I ask them to stop doing it.
Mr Speaker, he set about denigrating individual members of the Government. He ripped into Mr Duby; he ripped into Mr Collaery. I am surprised he did not try to rip into me, but then he knows that I am above reproach. That is the kind of debate, Mr Speaker, that brings disrepute onto this house.
MR SPEAKER: Order! Chief Minister, I request you to withdraw the comment. You imputed that Mr Duby and Mr Collaery were not beyond reproach.
MR KAINE: I withdraw that. In connection with the public service, Mr Speaker, Mr Whalan clearly did not want to listen. He did not want to hear, when I tabled the administrative arrangements this morning, about what is happening in the public service. He did not read them or he does not want to read them or he does not understand them. We are not making very many changes in the public service and those that we are making are thoroughly endorsed by the members of the public service. They welcome them, they greet them and they are anxious to get on with the job and to achieve some of the things that they could not do under the last Government because the proper administrative arrangements were not there to allow them to do them.
Mr Whalan brings up again this question of sacking people. I only know of one sacking from the public service, Mr Speaker, and it is rather ironic that the Deputy Chief Minister, as he then was, was the one who did it. We have not fired anybody; we do not intend to fire anybody. He well knows that the departure of the one remaining member, or the second last remaining member, of the NCDC senior staff who left the other day had nothing to do with this Government. He clearly had a job to go to, and that decision was taken under Mr Whalan's patronage, not ours. These assertions are sheer fabrications, and Mr Whalan is an expert at it.
He talked about the commitment of the public service to the Follett Government. Of course they were committed to the Follett Government, and they are now committed to the Kaine Government because they are professional public servants. Their commitment is to the government of the day. Any notion that they were somehow a bunch of Labor lackeys who were faithful to your Government and who have withdrawn their support from ours is a total denigration of those public servants, and I submit that the member should withdraw it. It is totally unacceptable.
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