Page 3724 - Week 12 - Thursday, 21 October 1993
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By and large, we believe that the auditor, as usual, has done a good job in those areas he has selected for carrying out performance audits and has made a number of very comprehensive recommendations in connection with each of them. Generally speaking, we believe that the agencies have responded satisfactorily. We have made two recommendations of our own which we would ask the Government to take up. One is the review of the collection agency within the Revenue Office, not the Revenue Office in its entirety. The other is that the Government should pick up a recommendation emerging from the Auditor-General's report that perhaps there are offices other than the ones I mentioned that are not publicly accountable and that the Government should identify them and bring their operations under the umbrella of the Audit Act, to make sure that all of our agencies where significant sums of public money are expended are fully publicly accountable. Having said that, I commend the report to the Assembly.
Debate (on motion by Ms Ellis) adjourned.
Sitting suspended from 12.06 to 2.30 pm
QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
ACTION - Work Practices
MRS CARNELL: My question is to the Minister for Urban Services. I refer the Minister to the budget decision to scrap overtime for ACTION workshop staff. I also refer to the decision to look at the archaic work practices of bus drivers. Given that there are 596 bus drivers and only 186 workshop staff, why has the Minister passed over the area in most urgent need of workplace reform?
MR CONNOLLY: Madam Speaker, the Liberals, who totally failed to deliver any change in relation to ACTION while they were in government and under whose administration the ACTION deficit reached its historically greatest depths, now make trite little statements such as, "Why don't you do something?". The Government is doing something. The Government is on track to reduce the ACTION deficit by $10m - a reduction of 20 per cent on the ACTION deficit, a faster rate of reduction than is being achieved anywhere else in Australia, on my advice. You may have claims from the Victorian Government that they are doing better, but I will take audit figures from the Grants Commission and the Industry Commission rather than propaganda from one State government. We are reducing our expenditure by 20 per cent.
We have in place dramatic proposals for change in the driving area. We are discussing with the union at the moment proposals for part-time drivers. That is a dramatic change. However, Mrs Carnell, if you listen when Mr Berry is giving answers, you may be a little wiser. If you listen when Mr Berry is giving answers on industrial relations issues, you may become aware that in this Territory we operate under a thing called the award system. That means that the Government is legally obliged to pay its workers the terms and conditions contained in an award. The Government cannot, at the stroke of a pen, say, "We will destroy your work practices". Liberals may refer to them as archaic work practices. Workers probably have rather different views.
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