Page 2169 - Week 07 - Thursday, 16 June 1994
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Employing their staff under a public service Act, and particularly with the protection that we have included, does not prejudice the independence of those bodies. That is demonstrated by the fact that already several legal aid commissions around Australia and all the DPPs employ their staff as part of the public service. I do not see why we need to be any different.
Madam Speaker, I would like to make some general comments about the Bill and, given the importance of the legislation, I think it is worth while spending a little bit of time drawing together the threads on the separate service as I have proposed it. The Assembly has before it an opportunity to establish an ACT Government Service to serve the people of this Territory. By establishing our own public service under our own legislation, we will be completing that final step in self-government for the ACT. The road to that self-government has been difficult, and the establishment of our own separate service has been no less difficult. If it had been easier, it would have been done earlier. I think that is pretty clear. But the Territory has now been self-governing for over five years, and it is time that we took this last step. We have a public service which has done a terrific job, I believe, in serving this community and certainly in serving the Government. As a government we recognise the contribution of our public servants, and we certainly do not want to diminish their morale or diminish their commitment. For our 23,000 public servants, the establishment of the separate service could well be the single most important event in their careers, and its importance for the Territory cannot be underestimated. That is why the Government has presented a Bill which offers a "no change" model for the individual terms and conditions of our employees while at the same time improving the equity, the accountability and the structural arrangements which will benefit the community.
Madam Speaker, establishing a separate public service is a great challenge for our public servants. As Mr Lamont said, the majority of them have met that challenge with cooperation and with support in the move to the separate service. They have served the Government and the community, as always, with loyalty and with dedication. One reason for that is that this legislation poses no threats to their security, to their terms and conditions and to their capacity to deliver services to clients - unlike what the Liberals want. In fact, the Bill is an improvement in terms of establishing a single service and providing mobility across the ACT service and into the Australian Public Service for many staff who do not currently have that capacity - some 14,000 of them. The options that were presented by Mrs Carnell for contract employment, privatisation and contracting out of services only serve to make public servants nervous and suspicious, and I would not be surprised if those kinds of proposals had a very poor effect on the morale of the service.
The Public Sector Management Bill, Madam Speaker, is not just a Bill developed by public servants for public servants. The Government set the agenda on this from the outset. When I first announced to this Assembly on 17 December 1992 that a new service would be established, I said that we would have a public service whose prime characteristics were a career service with entry and advancement on merit. I said that the legislation should set out the values and principles we expect our public servants to apply in the discharge of their duties and that the public service needed to be accountable to the Government. I said that public sector management needed to be proactive, responsible
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