Page 2339 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 June 1994
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MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (2.39): Madam Speaker, I am not about to die in a ditch over this matter because I believe that we all know what we mean. It is a case of "a rose by any other name", I suppose. There are a couple of points which I would like to make. The first of those is that, in the conventional sense, and based on the Westminster tradition, what we are dealing with in this Bill is, in fact, not a public service. Madam Speaker, the term "public service" generally includes the departments, but it does generally exclude statutory authorities and bodies of that nature. The term "public sector", a different term again, generally covers all of those - the departments, statutory authorities, government owned companies and so on; in fact, anybody who is paid from the public purse. So there are some definitional conventions which are generally used in public administration when looking at a Westminster model. What we have termed the "ACT Government Service" falls somewhere between the general public service and public sector definitions in that it does include government departments and some statutory authorities, but not our business enterprises and so on.
In practice it does not matter a great deal, but the particular title that we have drawn up for the Bill is also intended to assist in marking off the ACT service from the Commonwealth service. I think it is very important that there be that corporate spirit within the ACT Government Service. They do see themselves as an entity. They are known by a corporate name, and it is a name that could not readily be confused with the Australian Public Service, the APS, as opposed to what Mr Stevenson would refer to as the ACTPS. That definitional problem and the corporate identity problem have guided me in moving to the term "ACT Government Service".
If you look at the Bill you will see also that the terms I have referred to earlier are dealt with in the Bill. For example, in the section that Mr Stevenson referred to, under "Values and principles", the words there are:
Government agencies shall have an objective of implementing the following values and principles: ...
The first one is service to the public. There is no doubt about the intention of this service that we are establishing. It goes on under the heading "General principles of public administration". Because this is a much wider reference, the broader term "public sector" has been used there to encompass all of the bodies. As I said, Madam Speaker, this is not a matter on which I will go to the wall, but there are good reasons for using the term "Government Service". I commend that term to the Assembly, for the reasons that I have set out.
MR KAINE (2.42): Madam Speaker, the Chief Minister has convinced me of the merit of the amendment put forward by Mr Stevenson. While she was speaking I was reading through the Bill and I found clauses 6, 7, 8 and 9, to which the Chief Minister alluded. The very purpose of this Bill is to bring people within the ambit of a common ethic and a common approach - people who were not previously brought together in such a way. The words that the Chief Minister has in her own Bill indicate that the total purpose and the sole purpose of this new entity is to serve the public. She herself used some of the words. Clause 6 says:
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