Page 219 - Week 01 - Thursday, 15 February 1990
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indiscriminate sackings of public servants - and they must be regarded as sackings, Mr Speaker. Whether he carries out such a razor gang program by, as he says, natural wastage, early retirement, redundancy or whatever other means, they are sackings. I believe that this Government is indeed intent on sacking, particularly our young people. This will deny jobs to children in Canberra still at school. This Government will be cheating those children of a job in Canberra's work force.
I would ask you also, Mr Speaker, what sort of independent advice can we expect from Mr Kaine's Priorities Review Board. The membership, as we heard debated this morning, is made up of some very fine and some very prominent individuals, but I am not aware that the vast majority of them, nor indeed any of them, has an enormous amount of experience in public sector management. Not one of them is there to represent the views of ACT public sector employees, but certainly at least one of them can be expected to represent faithfully the views of the ACT Liberal Party. The Liberal approach to public enterprise is that it should be run like the private sector and that is why you get businessmen in to run it - businessmen who are intent on cutting services, who push prices up and will be putting profits into their own pockets.
I think it is about time that Mr Kaine and this Government opposite realised that public enterprise is not about profit. It is about giving services to the people who need them, the people in our own community. I would ask further, how independent can the board's conclusions be when Mr Kaine has already given clear directions as to the result they should come up with? He wants $100m cut from expenditure. He wants that achieved by sacking 3,000 public servants. That is what he wants and that means that one in five ACT public servants will be sacked. To say that you can achieve that kind of target without sacking people is simply not true. This exercise has got nothing to do with improving the public service. It is simply an ideological attack, another razor gang such as we have seen so many times before - most recently in New South Wales.
Mr Kaine has talked about how he is not going to attack service delivery but he will be attacking wastage in administration. But if he only carries out his attacks in administrative areas there will simply be no-one left to administer. In September of 1989 - Mr Kaine might want to take note of this fact - there were only 2,813 administrative staff in the ACT. The other 14,000-odd staff in the ACT are directly employed to undertake service delivery.
I can assure Mr Kaine that I do know what his agenda is and the people of Canberra also know what his agenda is because they have seen it all before. You are going to be selling off the assets that belong to the people of Canberra and you will be selling them off in the interests of your big business mates. You will be privatising education by
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