Page 2157 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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The overriding point is that individual agencies need flexibility to manage according to their skills, judgment and assessment of client demand in providing services in the most efficient way. In the case of ACTEW, ACTTAB and other business enterprises, the focus must be on commercial performance and responsibility, not regulations and bureaucratic processes. It is in this respect that the PSM Bill is entirely inappropriate. (Extension of time granted) ACTEW needs a high degree of autonomy to provide services efficiently at all times as demanded by customers, to attract staff and other resources from other electricity authorities and to market its expertise competitively. That seems all very solid. The same freedom should be available to other agencies that might choose to use it. That is, they should have the capacity to be free of the PSM Bill. Agencies which are expected to be competitive simply cannot afford to forgo productivity in order to meet bureaucratic and political demands.
What may work for a core department is entirely inappropriate for agencies whose role is to serve the public. Hence the centralised control over agencies which the Government is proposing in this Bill is counterproductive and ultimately destructive for the public enterprises which are forced to abide by its restrictive industrial relations codes. It is also interesting to note that the unions themselves do not want it. Instead of being driven by the dictates of a central regime, each government agency or department should have the autonomy to negotiate its own workplace or enterprise agreements with its employees to encourage flexibility, innovation and a culture for serving the public and its clients in the most effective way possible, with rewards related as far as possible to outcomes.
Just to remove any doubts over how far the Government is out of touch on which way the world is going, it should be noted that none other than the Trades and Labour Council says that the CEO of ACTEW should have vested employment powers through the ACTEW Act. That was said in a letter to the Chief Minister on 5 November 1993. That is a direct contradiction of what the Government wants in its PSM (Consequential and Transitional Provisions) Bill, which says in Part 34 of Schedule 1 that nothing in section 6 "shall be read as conferring on the Authority a power to enter into a contract of employment".
The Government is clearly wrong on this. Sooner or later reality will dawn. The Chief Minister should not deliver on her timing. She should not deliver on 1 July, because she has not delivered on the substance of the Bill. In addition to the many serious flaws in the Bill - and I think the 109-plus amendments that we currently have show just how many flaws there are - the Chief Minister has not been able to deliver on her promise to public servants that there would be full mobility between the ACT and Commonwealth services. We have been able, at least partially, to save her bacon on this one. I was interested to hear Mr Lamont's comments on this the other day when he suggested that we on this side of the house did not know what we were talking about. I would like to quote again from Ms Follett's ministerial statement. She said:
... we will propose that the present ways that staff can move between the two services should, at the very least, be maintained.
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