Page 3513 - Week 11 - Thursday, 14 October 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Lamont: Mrs Carnell, you have no idea. You have been spending too much time learning how to get on the band wagon.
MRS CARNELL: We are talking about what the Chief Minister said in her speech. Are you not interested in what your leader said? That is exactly what she said - she had absolutely no idea. If untargeted redundancies are not about sending little blue forms - I think they were blue, were they not? - to every single public servant, I really do not know what untargeted redundancies are. Of course they are untargeted, and they can only lead to problems in the morale in the public service. That is what we on this side of the house are concerned about.
What we are concerned about is having a public service that does not know where it is heading. Canberra relies heavily, both economically and socially, on an efficient, happy and productive public service. That is important to everybody in this town. I think 48 per cent of people in the ACT still work for the public service. Certainly that includes the Commonwealth Public Service, but a large percentage of those people work for the ACT. We want to look after those people. We believe - I think Mr Westende will back me up - that if you do not look after your staff you cannot run an efficient operation. If you do not make sure that your staff know what your corporate direction is, what you are trying to achieve, then you have no show whatsoever. Staff have to be part of any change. In fact, they should be part of initiating that change, if you want it to work.
The Chief Minister said, rightly, that the ACT had inherited a public service that it could not afford. We have never backed away from that. Mr Kaine has said that on many occasions. But the Chief Minister's only solution to that is to sack people, to get rid of people, to cut staff numbers. We already know that over the last couple of years - Mr De Domenico used these figures in his speech - there have been 698 redundancies; but unfortunately we have had only a 152 reduction in the public service, and that has cost us $17.2m. They have been very expensive redundancies if at the end of the day we achieved a reduction of only 152. I thought it was very interesting to note that of those people who have taken pay-outs we have re-employed 16. Is that good value for money? We have given people pay-outs and then we have re-employed them. That shows a total lack of direction for any organisation.
I said earlier that one of the things that we on this side see a real need to do is to nurture and promote talent in the public service. If you are going to do that, untargeted redundancies can only cause a problem. What we do not want to happen is for those public servants who have real talent, who have real direction, who have real drive, who know where this city is heading and are trying to lead it there, to end up taking voluntary redundancies because they have given up. That is what is likely to happen. They have given up because they do not know where the system they have is heading. What we have to do if we want to make this city work is make sure that our public servants have real job satisfaction. We need public servants who want to go to work every morning. We want public servants who know that this Government cares about them, will give them direction, will give them jobs that really matter. We want a happier, more dynamic, more innovative work force. It is fascinating to me for a government to talk about restructuring its public service - if that is what they are talking about; we are not too sure what they are talking about - without addressing the absolutely ludicrous inflexibility that exists in our public service at the moment.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .