Page 2153 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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Existing legislation is streamlined by consolidating a range of existing provisions such as the Teaching Service Act and the Maternity Leave (Commonwealth Employees) Act in one place. This will save time and effort and will also enable the public sector to provide better career paths and specialisation for small expert groups. Madam Speaker, the Bill can be easily updated and, more importantly, will be accessible to employees, providing flexibility while avoiding the worst features of bureaucracy, such as unresponsiveness and rigidity. The Assembly must today consider whether it is prepared to take an innovative approach to the management of the public sector or whether it will complacently disregard the changes that will finally allow the ACT to be fully self-determining.
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (9.11): Madam Speaker, the Government has really blown a unique opportunity to put a brand new public service in place. It had the opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the past, look carefully at what others were doing and create for the ACT the best possible system. In fact, that was something that the Chief Minister said on many occasions. It was the Government's opportunity to show real vision and leadership. Instead, it served up something that was a huge disappointment to just about everybody. I applauded the Chief Minister when she said in December 1992:
... we should take as long as needed to develop an excellent framework within which to manage an excellent service ... and when the job is done I want to be able to say that we have the best system of public sector management in Australia.
I think that Mr Moore should listen to this quote. Ms Follett did not say that this new ACT public service would be just a mirror of the present situation. She said:
... we should take as long as needed to develop an excellent framework within which to manage an excellent service ...
Unfortunately, she failed abysmally. Mr Moore, in his comments the other day, indicated, "We will just do it now and then we will fix it later". The fact is that Ms Follett thinks we have already fixed it. When she said that she would take as long as needed, we took her at her word, because she certainly took an enormous amount of time. The original target date was 1 July 1993. We all know what happened to that one. Then the new public service legislation was going to be passed in the Assembly before February 1994. Unfortunately, broken deadline was followed by broken deadline.
Now that this Bill is on the table it can only be described as a great disappointment. There is no way that the Chief Minister can say about this Bill that we have the best system of public sector management in Australia. In fact, this Bill goes close to being the worst. Other public sectors around the world are developing structures which put into effect the lessons of leadership, productivity and customer focus that have been learnt in the 1980s - one of the few good things that I think we learnt in the 1980s.
The Commonwealth Government has begun the task of drafting a new Public Service Act to create a management structure for the late 1990s and beyond. It is a matter of grave concern for the future of the ACT that this Bill seems to have been drafted in ignorance of the pace and direction of changes in the culture and structure of organisations over
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