Page 1914 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 14 June 1994
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It is a rather curious Bill, Madam Speaker, even in the minute detail. For example, right at the beginning, there are definitions of an employee and an officer. Both are neatly defined right up front in clause 3. By the time you get to clause 17, it comes up with this beaut definition:
In this Part, unless the contrary intention appears -
"officer" includes an employee.
In other words, you are both. What on earth does that mean? Right up front you go to great lengths to explain what an employee is, on the one hand, and what an officer is, on the other; and before you get beyond clause 17 you have thrown that out the window and said, "It does not matter. You are both". Again, right at the front, in the very first definition in fact, in subclause 3(1) you define an administrative unit. That is fairly informative. It means "a unit of the Service established under paragraph 13(1)(a)". You have to go to paragraph 13(1)(a) to find out what that means. I repeat that this Bill has 200-odd pages and 250-odd clauses, but by the time you get to clause 13 there is this little gem:
An administrative unit consists of the offices within that administrative unit.
What on earth does that mean? Here we have a Bill that goes into enormous detail to define everything, but by the time you get to clause 13 you have a circular definition that says that an administrative unit consists of the offices within that administrative unit. I do not know what it means. Does the Chief Minister know what it means? Do the authors of this document know what it means? Does Ms Szuty know what it means? I bet that she does not. You do not have to read very far into this document to discover that it is a very curious document.
I pick a few clauses at random. This is a very definitive Bill. There are 200-odd pages of it. Subclause 91(1) states:
A promotion or transfer of an officer to an office takes effect as provided by the management standards.
What management standards? The answer is that they do not exist yet. If we enact this legislation today, how does anybody know when a promotion or a transfer to an office takes effect? There are no standards. I do not know whether they intend to promulgate them, or by what means they intend to promulgate them, except that the Government will whip a few out by subordinate legislation and not tell the Assembly about them until after the event. As of right now, as far as I am aware, there are no management standards to operate to when we put this legislation into place. If the Government has its way, we will enact this legislation tonight. Of course, there are other little beauties, such as clause 74 on the role and functions of an executive staffing committee. I thought this sort of thing was done away with in our society 50 years ago. It is called blackballing.
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