Page 1897 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 14 June 1994
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The Public Sector Management Bill uniquely combines the position of the Commissioner for Public Administration with a chief executive function responsible for a Department of Public Administration. In the chief executive role the commissioner will be the head of the administrative unit known as the Department of Public Administration and will be responsible for all matters in relation to the management and operation of the ACT public service. Wider public sector management responsibilities will fall into three main areas: Services provided to agencies, management improvement, and communication and information. I have talked in some detail about the position of the Commissioner for Public Administration because I believe that it is an important one for the Assembly to address.
The legislation also needed to incorporate primary matters of public service administration, secondary matters being considered by way of subordinate legislation. This will occur in the ACT with the subsequent adoption of the public sector management standards, which will cover some 30 areas of more detailed matters of public administration, including salaries and allowances, training and development, ethics, anti-sexual harassment, fraud prevention, records management and purchasing. These standards when finalised will, of course, be subject to the scrutiny of the Assembly.
To my mind, there were overall two fundamental issues that arose from the committee's discussions and deliberations in South Australia and the Northern Territory. These were, firstly, the extent of inclusivity and exclusivity of the legislation - in other words, who is in and who is out of the public service legislation; and, secondly, the extent of the centralisation of administration and devolvement of responsibility which is encompassed in the legislation.
I will deal with the second issue first. The committee, during the hearing process, requested from the Office of Public Sector Management details of the roles and responsibilities of the Commissioner for Public Administration under the legislation. This information was particularly useful for the committee to understand the breadth of the commissioner's responsibilities. It must be said that the question of the balance of centralised administration as opposed to devolved responsibilities was not an issue of major concern raised during the public hearings, although the representative of the Trades and Labour Council, Ms Maureen Sheehan, raised some issues in relation to the position, along with others in relation to the Executive Staffing Committee as proposed, while the Assembly's Scrutiny of Bills Committee requested that a number of powers of the Commissioner for Public Administration be clarified.
I would now like to return to the issue of inclusivity versus exclusivity, which is the issue that took up the majority of the select committee's time in examining the Public Sector Management Bill. It became extremely clear during the committee's inquiry that there were three agencies who did not want and do not want to be covered by the provisions of the Public Sector Management Bill. The emergence of this issue would not have been unexpected by the Government, which has indicated firmly, through the Chief Minister in her presentation speech on the introduction of the Public Sector Management Bill, that it is looking for a unified public service. Therefore, it has fallen to these agencies to argue their way out of the provisions of the Public Sector Management Bill as they apply.
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