Page 2593 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
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Mr Collaery: That applies to us too, Mr Kaine.
MR KAINE: That is true. There has been some reference to the changing conditions of employment in the public service and the fact that we are moving more towards private enterprise conditions of service. The specifications for a good bureaucracy go back a long way before the Depression. There was a great deal of work done 100 years ago by a lot of learned people about what constituted a good public service. That was a reaction against the corrupt public services that existed at that time, when the way you got a job in the public service was to buy it. They were purchased because there were perks to be had from having jobs in the public service. That is why there was an almost rigid specification of what was required to be a public servant, how you got to be one, and what your obligations were when you did.
One of the early people, of course, was Weber. I am sure that everybody who studied Management 1 knows about Weber and his specification. Of course, the French picked that up and made an art form out of it. France probably is the only country in the world that has an administrative college that people are required to attend before they can become public servants. I think some of us could learn something from that. Perhaps we should have something similar. We have it at an advanced level, in the Administrative Staff College and the like. But people coming out of school into the bottom of the public service are expected to know exactly the way the system works, what they are supposed to do and how they are supposed to act in that big organisation; and it does not work that way. So, for almost a century we have had some fairly rigid specifications about public servants, and one of those was security of tenure.
In the last 10 to 15 years we in Australia have thrown a lot of that out the window. There are some good things about that, but there are some bad things about it too. An employee of the ACT Government has to be aware of both the good and the bad in all of that.
There are difficulties associated with the fact that our public service continues to be merely an extension of the Australian Public Service. The Australian Public Service was created to serve the Commonwealth. We are now a sovereign territory. We have our own objectives, our own aims, our own imperatives; and, like every other State and Territory in Australia, we should have a public service that responds to that.
That is why I floated for public debate the concept of perhaps breaking ourselves away from the Australian Public Service; so that we ourselves can determine what we want our public servants to do, how we want them to do it, how many we want, and our own organisational structure, not based and founded in Commonwealth practice going back
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