Page 2154 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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the past decade. If the Chief Minister believes in her words that we should take as long as is needed to develop an excellent framework, then that is exactly what she should do. She should take this Bill away and get it right. In fact, the Commonwealth are saying that with their new Bill they are looking at a very short Bill - one without all the bits and pieces that this Bill has in it, one that will allow their managers to manage. The Chief Minister's Government may not be around next February to live with the consequences of the mess she has made with this Bill, but Canberra cannot afford to see this opportunity for reform squandered.
Mr Moore said that we should let this Bill go through the Assembly and then, as I said before, move to reform the public service. This might be all right if Ms Follett had not put into place a substantially changed structure for the public service, if all she had done was simply change the letterhead and said, "Okay, we will just get the service in place and then get on with a new and wonderful structure". I think it is important to read a quote from a ministerial statement by the Chief Minister on 11 May 1993. She said:
... the Bill we will bring forward will be a management Bill as well as an employment Bill. By this I mean that the Bill will not be confined to employment of public servants. It will also deal with broader management issues, such as the review of organisations to increase efficiency and effectiveness.
That is not exactly a Bill that just changes the letterhead. The fact is that Ms Follett believes that she has already done the reform that Mr Moore suggests that we should do after the Bill is passed. As we move towards greater financial autonomy in the ACT, funds are getting scarcer while demands for public services are increasing. That is not news to anyone. Hence there is no option but to increase the productivity of the ACT public service - something the Chief Minister said that she was going to achieve with this Bill.
The more productive the public service, the lighter the financial burden without any deterioration of the quality of service. I am sure that the Chief Minister agrees. That is why improving the efficiency of the ACT public service should be a top priority of the Government, and the PSM Bill should reflect this priority. Unfortunately, it does not. The Bill should be all about fostering a culture of service, innovation and excellence. It certainly does not do that. The focus should be on objectives and performance in achieving those objectives, not on processes and procedures.
To show that this Government has learnt nothing from the lessons of reform of other public services, the aim of the Bill seems to be to entrench and centralise conditions and working arrangements of public servants and to guarantee a legislated dominant role for union representatives. It is concerned with inputs, processes and the interests of the providers of the service, without any seeming interest in the outcomes. Indeed, the bulk of the material from clauses 55 to 231, with only a very few exceptions, covers an immense range of terms, conditions and procedures which do not need to be in legislation at all. Instead, they should be determined after negotiation with staff by each agency - the same view that the Commonwealth is taking.
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