Page 2155 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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I support very strongly the Government setting out a clear philosophy and direction for the public service. I also support the Government setting basic conditions covering the principles of public administration, management, conditions of service - such as annual leave, health and safety requirements and so on - and, of course, the obligations of employees, clauses 6, 7, 8 and 9. However, within that framework other rights and obligations and the means of dispute resolution should be inherent in the ethos of an organisation and covered by workplace agreements. They certainly should not be in this Bill. They are matters for which management should be responsible in the normal course of building a sound, constructive and committed relationship with the agency team. Obviously, the employees of agencies would have input into all matters concerning their working environments and conditions. That is just good management.
Each agency must have the capacity to exercise judgment in how the resources of the agencies are deployed to meet performance objectives and at the same time create a fair and harmonious work environment, without having to be enmeshed in bureaucratic procedures required by this Bill. Managers must be given the responsibility and flexibility to meet the changing demands of services and to make decisions necessary to meet the financial and productivity requirements of both government and the community that they serve.
What the Government fails to understand is that the tried and trusted and proven principle of management is that the primary unit of administration and accountability is the agency. Any person who has any experience in managing an organisation, whether it be public or private, knows that for a fact. Indeed, a salient lesson which I hope the Government has learnt from the VITAB debacle is that it tried to move the responsibility for ACTTAB away from the organisation itself. That is the problem of this Labor Government. They want to have control of everything or, alternatively, think that they can have control over everything. Look at the result. If ACTTAB had been genuinely autonomous, there would have been no doubt about who was responsible. But this Government brought ACTTAB under the control of the Minister, so we all know where the buck stopped.
If the Government knew the first thing about the principles of management, it would understand that the agency is the point of administration, performance and accountability. The failure to act on this principle is a really fundamental flaw in this Bill. The Bill does not decentralise authority. In fact, Mr Moore said on a number of occasions that he did not like the fact that this Bill centralised everything. This Bill goes totally the wrong way. It centralises control in top bureaucracy and in the Chief Minister herself. For example, appointments and promotions are centralised and therefore open to political direction and patronage. Under clauses 27 and 28 the Chief Minister can create or abolish chief executive positions and can appoint chief executives. Subclause 28(3) even allows the Chief Minister expressly to ignore clause 65, which requires appointments to be made on merit with no unlawful discrimination and without patronage or favouritism; that is, the Chief Minister can lawfully appoint a chief executive without merit and under patronage and favouritism. I wonder whether that is what she really intends. Is this her
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