Page 22 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 22 February 1994
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What in fact has she said in those three speeches? The answer is "very little", because she focused entirely on the mechanics of the public service as well. In fact, the tone of her speeches is such that you can almost guarantee that the very same public servants who have done all the work on this issue over the last couple of years wrote her speeches for her. There is no change. The wording is bureaucratic. They are non-definitive. They are even ambiguous. There is no political direction, or even a sense of any political direction, in any of those things. I could go through them; but they talk entirely about the public service itself, the rights and prerogatives of the members, and not about structural and other change.
What has been done so far is quite proper and is quite necessary. Obviously, no government could move towards severing thousands of public servants from the Australian Public Service without preserving the existing rights and prerogatives that those people enjoy. It is fundamental. I was talking about that when I was Chief Minister in 1990. Here we are in 1994 and the Chief Minister is still talking about it, but she has not done anything about it. The legislation that she expected, confidently, in May last year would be passed by this Assembly by now is not even on the table. We have not even seen it.
The efforts that have been put forward so far, by the public servants, I repeat, have been unduly restrained and directed not toward innovation and vision but, on the contrary, to preserving the status quo. Everything that the Chief Minister has said, even in her speech today, talks about preserving the status quo. It talks about maintaining public servants' superannuation entitlements, perpetuating the use of Comcare, and mobility between the public service and the APS. It is all good stuff, but there is not a single change from what we do now. In other words, what we have today is just great, and we do not want and we do not need to change anything. Nobody can sit here today and tell me that an organisation with 23,000 people in it is operating at its best; that it has the best structure; that its role, functions and responsibilities are clearly defined in the most optimal fashion. If you do, you know nothing about organisation or organisational dynamics. It simply is not the case.
The problem is that the exercise demands much more than what has been put into it so far. In particular it demands that the Government do some constructive and innovative thinking, and provide some direction from the top. There needs to be direction on such matters as the organisational form that this structure is going to take and how effectiveness and efficiency are going to be enhanced, and some specification of what the corporate roles, functions and objectives of this new organisation are going to be. How can you set out to create a new organisation of 23,000 when you have not even defined what its roles, functions and objectives are going to be? That is the responsibility of government. It has not been done. If it has been done, perhaps the Chief Minister can table the document that shows that it has been. I have not seen anything like that.
How can public servants deduce what is in the minds of their political masters if it is not articulated clearly? Ms Follett's only recognition of the totality of this need consists of one small sentence out of the only three public statements that she has ever made on the matter. I quote from her speech in a public service forum only three or four days ago. I quote what the Chief Minister said:
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