Page 2353 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 June 1994
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Clauses 28 and 32, by leave, taken together
MRS CARNELL (Leader of the Opposition) (3.28), by leave: I move together:
9. Page 17, line 15, subclause 28(3), omit "section 65 does", substitute "subsections 65(1), (3) and (4) do".
9A. Page 18, line 14, subclause 32(2), omit "section 65 does", substitute "subsections 65(1), (2) and (4) do".
Madam Speaker, this issue, we think, is very important. We believe that for the Chief Minister to ignore such important issues as discrimination, favouritism or patronage, which we believe are basic to any form of fairness, is simply unacceptable. This part of the Bill allows the Chief Minister to ignore the requirements of clause 65. If the Chief Minister is allowed to make appointments with patronage, with favouritism, and with discrimination as well, what are we talking about here? I think it is a totally unacceptable situation. Under those circumstances, we will inevitably move to a totally politicised senior public service.
The point I have made before on this is that if you are going to go down that track, if you are going to make sure that your senior public servants are totally tied to the Government, so be it. Let their contracts be tied to the tenure of the Chief Minister or her Ministers. But that is not what this Bill does. It certainly allows senior public servants to have contracts, but it in no way ties those contracts to the tenure of a Minister or the Chief Minister. In some circumstances, of course, those people will have tenure. What we are doing here, as a result of the way senior public servants have been treated in this Bill, is an attempt, small as it may be, to ensure that those appointments are made in the most basic way - that is, without favouritism, without patronage and without discrimination. It seems basic to any fairness, to any equity, in the senior ranks of the public service.
MS FOLLETT (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (3.30): The Government will be opposing this amendment by Mrs Carnell, and there are a number of reasons for doing so. We have decided to retain the Commonwealth Public Service model for the selection of chief executives. Mrs Carnell has mentioned repeatedly "senior public servants". These are not senior public servants, in a broad sense; they are heads of agencies - permanent heads, as they used to be known, departmental secretaries. They are positions which traditionally are considered by Cabinet. Under the Commonwealth arrangement, merit is not the only consideration in appointments to those positions. It is very important, in positions of this seniority, that the relevant Ministers feel that they have a close personal relationship with the head of their department, and that consideration goes in parallel with merit considerations.
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