Page 2348 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 June 1994
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Chief Minister just said is absolute gobbledegook and she simply has no comprehension, or she gives every impression that she has no comprehension, of the way the machinery of government is set up in the rest of the country. It seems to be that if we did not invent it here it does not work. What we are inventing here is something totally inconsistent, totally out of line, with what everybody elsewhere in Australia seems to think is the proper way to go, and that is to decentralise; to quote the Chief Minister and some of her Ministers, "to let the managers manage".
This is one of these best business practices that have been adopted and which are talked about here somewhere. What we are not doing is introducing best business practice. We are introducing practices of the 1930s, when it was the business of government, it seemed, to run everything, to control everything, and not let one single person paid by the public purse out of the control of a Minister. That is what we are reverting to. We could go back a little further to 1919, I suppose, and introduce what happened with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. I am sure that that would suit this Government just fine, but I do not think it would suit anybody else.
Madam Speaker, while I know that numbers is numbers, the Chief Minister really does need to brush up on public administration and the machinery of government and stop talking the nonsense that she has been purporting to be logical argument against what the Leader of the Opposition is suggesting.
MR LAMONT (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Housing and Community Services, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (3.14): Madam Speaker, I am pleased, following Mr Kaine's dissertation and the nonsense from Mrs Carnell, that I have the opportunity to respond to a number of issues that I think go to the heart of the philosophical position adopted by the Liberals in their amendment this afternoon. Let us look at the New Zealand model. It is the New Zealand model that Mr Kaine referred to as far as public administration is concerned that is at the heart of Mrs Carnell's one-page budget strategy that Mr Humphries was forced to table in this chamber last Thursday night. It is that New Zealand model of public administration that really underlines the general thrust of all of your concerns about what should happen here in the Government Service.
I think it is appropriate that people listening to this debate this afternoon throughout this building talk to their friends, their neighbours and in their workplaces about the strategy that the people opposite have for administering this Territory, should - heaven forbid - they ever get onto the treasury benches. Madam Speaker, one would presume from their model of what an administrative unit is that we would find that there would be extensive privatisation of government services in the ACT. That is what this is all about.
Mrs Carnell: Rubbish!
MR LAMONT: Mrs Carnell says, "Rubbish". She was on the Matthew Abraham program one morning this week talking about exactly that. Unfortunately, because she does not understand, she did not take into account the shortfalls in the proposal that she was putting. That is what the problem is with this amendment as far as what constitutes an administrative unit is concerned.
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