Page 26 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 22 February 1994
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We will establish a unified service that will span almost all of our 23,000 public sector employees. That is a much broader coverage than that of the present Commonwealth Public Service Act, which covers only about 13,000 of our present employees. We will be establishing an executive staffing committee which will make promotions in the Senior Executive Service. This committee of agency heads will also reaffirm the independence of the service from political interference and the merit based nature of public sector employment. In addition to retaining legislative provision for equal employment opportunity and industrial democracy, as I have said before, we will legislate for access and equity principles,. I think that that is another first for the ACT and a real reform.
Madam Speaker, the role of our commissioner for public sector management, however called, will go beyond the traditional public service commission role of personnel management reviews to a much broader statutory role of management review across the service, and that will be another important vehicle for driving the Government's reforms. We will be abolishing the Australian citizenship requirement that applies to the Australian Public Service. I think that will remove a form of discrimination that is simply not justifiable in this Territory and in this time. We will make our so-called continuing employees, who are mostly blue-collar workers, officers. That will remove the longstanding second-class citizen status of those employees, and open up new careers and new mobility for them. In line with the Estimates Committee recommendations, we will be legislating against double dipping by banning employees who have accepted a voluntary redundancy pay-out from being re-employed within two years, unless it would be in the interests of the Territory to do so. We will have full reciprocal mobility with the Australian Public Service, and that was a must, I thought, in creating our own public service. It is in fact another first, and it establishes a very desirable precedent for further reform at a national level as interservice mobility is on the COAG agenda.
We will reform temporary and casual employment practices. I think this is fair to our employees, and it will certainly enhance the accountability of managers in their use of that kind of labour. We will consolidate all of the subordinate rules, regulations and instructions of public employment into a single set of public sector management standards, which will be written in much plainer language than the current rules are. This is consistent with our view that managers should be more clearly responsible and accountable for their management. We cannot reasonably ask this of managers unless we make it easy for them to know what is expected of them at both the broad level, through the values and the principles that I spoke about that will be in the Bill, and the detailed level, through the public sector management standards. Finally, Madam Speaker, as I have said, we will be including what are known as whistleblower provisions in the Bill, based on the Gibbs committee recommendations. I spelt out some detail on that in my speech last week. Madam Speaker, the reforms that we will make in the Public Sector Management Bill are very substantial, and that is only the start. The Government is committed to further public sector reform through enterprise bargaining and budget initiatives, and that will become plainer over the coming weeks and months.
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