Page 2164 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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I understand that the only course left to you is to become spoilers. You missed your opportunity on the budget. You have responded with one-page logic. You are now trying to create an issue and drag this matter out. It is not good enough for you to adopt that attitude if you want to be a responsible opposition. You should be run out of town for that sort of logic. That is, in fact, what you deserve. I am very pleased that Mr Moore will support the Bill, and I am confident that Ms Szuty, when she has been able to look at all of the amendments, and Mr Stevenson will also support the finalisation of this matter when it is next before the Assembly.
MR HUMPHRIES (9.56): Madam Speaker, if Mr Lamont really thinks that the only people who oppose this Bill are those who have only one-page logic, as he puts it, to put up against it, then he seriously underestimates the widespread concerns that have been expressed by all sorts of people about this Bill. In fact, I cannot recall any piece of legislation which has been so widely condemned by the very constituencies it is meant to assist. We have had talk about the commemorative balloons, the pens and the mugs to mark the creation of a separate ACT public service. I suppose that those things are meant to convey some sense of pride and achievement in having a separate ACT public service. Where is the sense of pride, the sense of occasion? Is this move welcomed by the people it is meant to affect? This Bill rivals the Electoral Bill as a major, keynote piece of government legislation, as a centrepiece of the Government's program, with a long lead time. It has arrived on the scene to almost universal dismay.
With those problems, the Government, rather than saying, "Yes, let us work through it, discuss it and talk about it", is rushing headlong towards some artificially imposed deadline which it feels has to be met come what may. The reason has not been explained, but it must be met come what may. It leaves a great many people severely dissatisfied with the process and, most particularly, with the outcome. I do not know of any community sector which has actually welcomed this legislation. The question we have to ask ourselves in the midst of this fairly widespread anger about the way in which the Bill has proceeded and about the disappointments and the broken promises that have accompanied this legislation is: Is this legislation going to be a springboard for providing excellence in our public service? Are we going to create the best public service in Australia? Why should we not create the best public service in Australia? We have a discrete community with long historical experience of public service management. We have the most up-to-date legislative opportunity, in the sense that we have all the other legislation to look at. Why could we not create the best possible legislation for the best possible public service? Are we going to do that with this legislation? I do not think we are. I do not think anybody else thinks we are, except for those people across the way, who insist that this has to go ahead right now and that we have to race into this. "It is better to have the thing in place than to have it done properly" seems to me to be the argument. Any measure which throws the unions and the Liberals into the same corner must be pretty bad. It must be pretty bad, to generate that kind of bedfellowship.
The discussion of the areas where exemptions or opting out from the inclusive nature of this legislation might apply illustrates very well the problem which we face in this legislation. It has been argued, for example, that ACTEW should be excluded from the scope of the Bill. It is a service provider; it is a government business enterprise. It has a different structure and role to those of other government organs. Fair enough.
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