Page 5804 - Week 18 - Tuesday, 10 December 1991
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I will deal with the mechanics of the Bill first and then come back and mention something of the concept of corporatisation. What the Bill does is to recognise that when a body that is a government body is turned into a corporation there are some people there who are employed under the Public Service Act. This seeks to preserve for those people the rights which they have under the Public Service Act. That seems to me to be a fair principle to employ; but it is noted, of course, that any future employees will not be public servants. They will not be employed under the Public Service Act but will be employed under different terms and conditions.
I think it is indefensible that a public servant should not have his or her rights preserved when they are compulsorily moved into a corporate body such as this. It will, of course, create possible problems for the future when you find two people sitting side by side, one of whom is a former public servant with one set of terms and conditions and the other a person newly recruited who perhaps has a different set of terms and conditions. I can only hope that in the long term both of those people will enjoy terms and conditions better than those currently enjoyed by the public servant, and that is why one moved to corporatise such a body. So, the Liberal Party has no difficulty with the notion, although we can see the possibility in the future of differences in the employment terms and conditions of two people.
The interesting thing about this Bill, however, is the strange and inexplicable ambiguity on the part of this Government in connection with turning government bodies into corporatised bodies. When we left government there were two bodies considered for corporatisation, with a third one following close behind. The Government has chosen to corporatise only one. There are arguments for turning government bodies into corporate bodies and I do not know that we need to dwell on them at great length. The first of them is to get them off the public budget, get them off public funding, and turn them into bodies that can compete as though they were fully privatised bodies competing in a commercial sense with other organisations performing similar functions.
There have been many arguments put forward as to why it is a worthwhile thing to do. Indeed, at the Commonwealth level a Labor Government is talking about corporatising all sorts of activities, including our national airline, our internal domestic airline and other major operations such as that. Here at our level we have a government that says that this little operation out there in Mitchell is right for corporatisation but ACTEW is not. I believe that there is a certain ambivalence there.
If the conditions that justify the corporatisation of a public operation are acceptable for one Territory owned operation, how is it that they do not apply to others? What is the Government's explanation for its divergence of
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