Page 1945 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 16 June 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
MR DE DOMENICO: It is an issue that all people in the ACT are interested in, Mr Lamont. It will be very interesting to see, when it is time to put up your hand, what your attitude to that is going to be.
Mr Lamont: I will tell you what it is. It will not be to let you anywhere near it. That is the attitude.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order!
MR DE DOMENICO: Madam Speaker, if that is not pre-empting a vote of the Assembly in the future, I do not know what is. Thank you, Madam Speaker; I will go by your guidance and protection. It was interesting to read the survey, and I believe that other people, once they get a chance and find it in the library, will also find it very interesting reading.
MR KAINE (4.44): I will just throw in a couple of statistics, some of which have been referred to before, and some not. The relevance of this document is that it is a snapshot of an organisation on a particular day, essentially. If you asked the same questions now, you would get different answers, and you would then be in a position to make some judgment about whether things have changed for the better or for the worse or whether they have changed at all. One has to take the study in some sort of context, I think.
When all is said and done, I thought the most interesting statistics were those where people expressed a preference for their next year. I was interested to note that, in answer to the question as to whether they were happy or unhappy, 33 per cent said that they were going to be looking for jobs, either within the APS elsewhere or within the ACT Government Service elsewhere. So approximately one in three of the 300 people in the Chief Minister's Department, in answer to the question as to whether they were happy or unhappy, said, "I am going to try to be working some place else next year". I thought that was interesting.
There are one or two statistics that I thought were interesting - not so much because they relate to this particular organisation, but because there may be something here that the Government should be looking at across the entire public service. One of those is the question of effectiveness. Only 39 per cent of people said that performance indicators have been developed for their section or branch and only 24 per cent said that they were being used. That was of interest to me, and I would have thought it would be of interest to members of this Assembly. In consecutive estimates committees over four years now we have attempted to get some idea as to just how good performance indicators are across the service and whether they have any real validity. The public servants themselves, within this particular organisation, seem to agree with the members of this Assembly that the performance indicator system is not working or, if it is, it is not working very well.
The other interesting statistic was that only 38 per cent of people thought their corporate plan was being used as a management tool. This is the Chief Minister's Department, and only 38 per cent thought their corporate plan was being used. I think that to place too much weight on this would be wrong, but there are a couple of comments that flow from it. One is that it is interesting that it is the Chief Minister's Department, because it is within that department that the Office of Public Sector Management resides. That is the organisation that in a way, you could argue, is driving the management processes and procedures, driving
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .