Page 1458 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 17 April 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Government Vehicles
MR STEVENSON: Mr Speaker, my question is to the Chief Minister and it is in line with my question yesterday about the use of public vehicles for personal use - something that has been brought to my attention many, many times by constituents over the last couple of years. What action will the Chief Minister take now that the matter has basically come out into the open in the report mentioned in the Canberra Times this morning?
MR KAINE: Mr Speaker, I think that Mr Stevenson is well aware that the use of, and the resources made available for, publicly owned vehicles of the ACT Government is something that I have been looking at for many months. The information that I have been getting generally supports the information that has now been brought out by the Auditor-General. As with any Auditor-General's report, the Government will consider the matters now raised and will take whatever corrective action is required in the managerial sense to get the matter under control.
I am quite sure that the Public Accounts Committee will have a look at this and I am quite sure that they will have something to say on it as well. It will be the Government's intention, and has been my intention for many months, to make sure that the amount of public money being put into motor vehicles for the ACT Government Service is confined to what is absolutely necessary and that those vehicles are used only for the purposes for which they are provided. We now have the basis for some fairly positive action to make sure that we achieve those objectives.
MR STEVENSON: I have a supplementary question. Does the Chief Minister consider that there might be some worth in looking at the greater use of a pool of vehicles in certain circumstances to perhaps prevent a vehicle being used by one person only being left for long periods of time?
MR KAINE: I think that there are pool arrangements already in place in the ACT Government Service, Mr Speaker, as indeed there are in this Assembly. Clearly that is one possible course of action that the Government could adopt. I think that in some cases that is not appropriate for operations like those conducted by the Community Nursing Service, where nurses have to be out and about on an individual basis. There is a quite large number of them and it would be most inappropriate to require them to operate on a pool system. In fact, it probably would not be effective. No doubt there are other places where such a system could be put in place. Obviously we will look at that as an option.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .