Page 1200 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 11 May 1993
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In my December statement I said that we expected to achieve a separate service by 1994. That remains my expectation. I have said since that I do not expect the necessary legislation to be passed by this Assembly until February 1994, and that is still my expectation. But let me emphasise, Madam Speaker, an important point that I made in my December statement which does seem to have been overlooked. I hope that members will forgive me if I quote myself briefly:
... we should take as long as needed to develop an excellent framework within which to manage an excellent service ... and when the job is done I want to be able to say that we have the best system of public sector management in Australia.
I make this point because of recent media talk of delay; because of a supposed failure to meet a target of 1 July this year. Such talk does not advance the issue. Without dwelling on the point, Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister, in his initial letter of April 1992, recognised that a 1 July target, which was 14 months away at the time, could be subject to slippage. My officers have been working full-time on the separate service for less than five months because my initial response to the Prime Minister was to seek and to gain agreement on a range of threshold issues.
I would also like to allay any concerns about the cost of moving to a separate service. In my first letter to the Prime Minister in May last year I sought an establishment grant from the Commonwealth to cover the transitional costs of this move. I subsequently sought, and the Commonwealth agreed to pay, a sum of $460,000, which we have since received. In that same letter I also sought a transfer of recurrent funding associated with public service functions that are still performed for the ACT by the Commonwealth, such as the determination of conditions under the Public Service Act. I will pursue this issue with the Commonwealth in formal negotiations that are likely to commence later this month.
Madam Speaker, the Government has a vision for our ACT Government Service which I outlined in my earlier statement. That vision is for a unified service spanning the whole public sector and offering the broadest range of career opportunities to our public servants. It is a vision for mobility of staff between our public service and the Australian Public Service. This will maximise career opportunities and give our public service the broadest possible pool from which to recruit talented staff to serve this community. I believe that we can have a career service with sound values and principles, underpinned by legislation for all to see. In short, it is a vision of excellence in service to the Government and to the community.
To ensure that we properly understand what the community expects of the public service, and the values they expect public servants to hold, my department recently organised a symposium on values and principles for our new service which was attended by a number of community members from diverse backgrounds. There were representatives present of unions, employers, women's groups, youth and the ageing, to mention just a few. In my opening speech I asked the symposium to test the values I articulated in my December statement, and to add to them if possible. I have yet to receive a full report on the outcomes of the symposium, but the initial feedback is that there was a high, perhaps even surprising, degree of unanimity among the community representatives about the
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