Page 3515 - Week 11 - Thursday, 14 October 1993
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PUBLIC SERVICE - PROGRESS TOWARDS SEPARATION
Ministerial Statement
Debate resumed from 11 May 1993, on motion by Ms Follett:
That the Assembly takes note of the paper.
MR DE DOMENICO (4.10): It is appropriate that we should be debating the Chief Minister's paper today after we just spent nigh on an hour talking about voluntary separation schemes. I will attempt to make my comments brief. I will see how we go. Madam Speaker, the Prime Minister, Mr Keating, wrote to Ms Follett and her Government in April 1992, I believe, informing it that preparations should commence for the separation of the ACT public service from the apron-strings of the Commonwealth. It seems, when one reads the Government submission to the select committee that has been established by this Assembly, that nothing happened for about 12 months. The Liberal Party, during that time, had constantly said, "Listen, it is about time something was done". If we were to establish a public service within 12 months, or even 24 months, something needed to be done right from the beginning.
Right from the beginning of this historic change we have seen that the Government was reluctant to face the issues which must be resolved. The fact is that the separation of the ACT public service from the Commonwealth will force any ACT government to deal with issues like enterprise bargaining, the size and structure of the current public service, superannuation, and mobility and ethical questions, all of which are tough issues. There is no denying that. It will take a government with spine, with vision and with guts to engineer this transition, and to engineer it properly. "Properly" is the operative word. Anybody can engineer it, but it has to be engineered properly. I have no doubt that these are some of the reasons for the Government's reluctance, any government's reluctance, to proceed quickly, and it should not be proceeding quickly. Right from the beginning we have run smack into confusion once again. Let us start with who has the carriage of this issue. It could be the Chief Minister, with her responsibility for the public service; but it was the Industrial Relations Minister, Mr Berry, whom we heard on radio at the beginning. He was saying that employee numbers would not be reduced. What a hypocritical statement that has turned out to be! I think his words on the Matthew Abraham show were, "We will carry across all the 23,000", or whatever number it was.
We have spoken a lot this afternoon about the voluntary redundancy package, and about the lack of vision and the lack of targeting; but it is no wonder that at the beginning the Government was reticent about the separation of the ACT public service. It is a Pandora's box of issues which the Government, I believe, is ill equipped to deal with. Its alliances mean that it will have to cut its own throat sometimes in order to deal with some of the issues now facing it. Mr Berry, the Minister for Industrial Relations, we believe, has the carriage of many of these issues facing the Government on the separation of the public service. He is the Minister for Industrial Relations and obviously will have to have discussions with his counterpart, Mr Brereton. Once again, Mr Berry was the man heard to say on the radio, before any decisions were made and any work was done, "We will carry across 23,000". He was part of the Cabinet, I should imagine, that approved of the then $17m voluntary separation scheme.
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