Page 3560 - Week 12 - Thursday, 19 September 1991
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MR MOORE (4.01): Mr Acting Speaker, I will not take the full 1 hours that I would be entitled to as leader of two parties. I will, instead, take just a few minutes to work through some areas that have not been discussed very much by other members in the reply to the budget.
I think that the setting of priorities has once again been left to public servants. Three years in a row we have seen bureaucratic budgets. The advantage of that is that on each of those occasions we have basically seen a balanced budget. I think that both the Treasurers - Ms Follett as Treasurer in the first Follett Government, and now; and Trevor Kaine last year - were actually coming up with the concept and making sure that they worked towards a balanced budget. That, indeed, was the appropriate way to go. In this case credit goes to Ms Follett for also attempting to cut down on the borrowings of the Territory as a whole. There is, though, a case for borrowing in certain circumstances, and I will come to that case in a short while.
I think the first thing to do is to look at the proposed cuts in public servants. This is something that Trevor Kaine has announced previously; he was going to cut, on my recollection, something like 3,000 public servants. But, of course, the result of the Alliance Government's attempt to cut public servants was in fact an increase in the number of public servants during the Alliance Government of some 400.
What we have here is a proposal to cut somewhere between 200 and 550 public servants - we are not quite sure how many. I would say to Ms Follett and the Labor Government that I think that is an appropriate way to go. I think most people in Canberra recognise that in straitened times we are going to have to cut back on the number of public servants we need to service our Territory and at the same time maintain services. There is a methodology that could be employed to ensure that you do not fall into the same trap that Trevor Kaine did; the trap of saying, "I am going to cut the number of public servants", but then ruling over a situation where they are increased.
I suggest that the Government set about this task using the following methodology: As of today, do the advertising and filling of all public service positions only with ministerial approval. If you do that, if you decide that positions can be advertised and filled only with ministerial approval, you will be able to ascertain where you can cut the public servants back by attrition. I do not believe that anybody here will advocate straight firing of public servants; we would prefer to see a redundancy package offered, where it is appropriate, or the numbers gained by attrition.
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