Page 4406 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 8 December 1993
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You achieve change in the public transport sector and in the industrial context through negotiation, discussion and innovation, not through confrontation. That is what marks the ACT Government's approach in stark contrast to the Liberal Party's process. Our own report indicates that we need to achieve a saving of $15m on the total budget. There is a significant difference there, Mr Deputy Speaker, because what we said in our original budget strategy was that we were intending to achieve $10m off the recurrent subsidy - in effect, $10m off $49m.
Mrs Carnell: Over three years.
MR CONNOLLY: Over three years. We are in front of the target on that. What the Travers Morgan report indicates is that we should be achieving $15m off a figure in the order of $80m-odd, which is our recurrent cost, our capital cost and all of the debt servicing costs, some of which have never been properly accounted for in the past. I acknowledge that we will go for that target, but we are on track for the recurrent level of saving. We need to achieve significant further savings on capital. As I have indicated, the current round of new bus acquisitions is likely to be the last for quite some time. I publicly indicated that we will look very severely at any new bus purchases. We will concentrate more of our efforts on refurbishing and extending the life of the existing fleet.
We have a problem, identified by Travers Morgan, in the workshop. That is not a problem that this Government created; it is not a problem that the Alliance Government created. It is a problem that was allowed to accumulate over 15 or 20 years. We have created a workshop infrastructure which is vastly in excess of the requirements of the current ACT Government's operations. We cannot just race off and sack people. People were recruited and brought into that system on certain premises. What we need to do is work out ways of better utilising people, gradually going through an orderly process of reducing that oversupply of workshop expertise, which runs to senior engineer oversupply as much as it does to mechanics. It was apparent, through the Auditor-General's inquiry, which again we initiated - we pulled this benchmark study on ourselves to find out the level of efficiency or otherwise - that there was an overuse of overtime in the workshops, and an unnecessary use of overtime in the workshops. The Government acted and that overtime was removed.
Mr Deputy Speaker, we are identifying these problems in the workshop area. The path for the future is clearly a combination of things. One is the introduction of part-time drivers, which is something we are discussing with the Transport Workers Union at the moment. Another is a process of further multiskilling, which again we are discussing with the Transport Workers Union at the moment. We can easily identify at an early stage a number of ACTION employees who do drive buses as part of their ordinary duties but not on the road. They obviously are the first people to use for multiskilling. I am talking there of washers, cleaners and tyre changers - people who do that sort of work.
The obvious next step - we have floated this with both unions - is to look at multiskilling some of the mechanics into the driver ranks. I would look, when we next advertise for drivers, at having a restricted process of recruitment by first advertising for drivers within the organisation, within ACTION. We will first look to recruit from within ACTION so that existing staff, if they are interested and qualify for the job, have the opportunity of moving across.
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