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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 2613 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

dissenting report. There are plenty of people with some expert opinion in the field of public management who could and should have been invited to attend and present their views. I put forward three names - for some reason they were all unavailable - but nobody else put forward any names. Nobody else wanted to hear any expert opinion. I submit, Mr Speaker, that the reason for that was that the chair had already made up her mind about what the report was going to say and she did not want to hear any evidence.

There was one submission from the Australian Society of Certified Practising Accountants. You would think that they would be fairly expert in the field of management, would you not? Their submission, although brief, supported wholeheartedly the Government's position on this Bill. They were not invited to attend the hearing, or, if they were, it would be news to me. Certainly nobody turned up. There was no indication that they were invited. There was no indication of whether they had had an opportunity to come or not come. Why? They were the third party that made a submission. There was one minor one from another organisation which generally said, "We agree with the change of name". The Australian Society of Certified Practising Accountants, having made a submission, was not even invited to come and to give evidence. I have to ask why.

Those sections of the report which I reject, Mr Speaker, I submit, again, are nothing more than the opinion of the chair, and I would like to take up one or two particular points in question. Chapter 4 of the report is headed "The Public Interest". If you read my dissenting report you will note that I reject the whole of that section, except for paragraph 4.1, which is the stated rationale for amending the legislation. Paragraph 4.2 begins:

The committee is somewhat bemused ...

Well, I was not, and I was the only other person present when the evidence was being given. I was not bemused at all. I would submit, Mr Speaker, that, of the three members of the committee, I could reasonably and honestly claim to be the person best qualified to deal with this matter, having been a senior public servant for 13 years, and a management consultant, operating from the Office of the Public Service Board, for three of those years. So I do know something about large-scale organisations, and I do know something, from hard experience, about reorganisations and how the public sector might work better; but they are my own opinions. I did not seek to have my opinions reflected in here, although I am probably, as I say, best qualified of the three members of the committee to have such personal opinions expressed. I do not happen to think that committees are about expressing personal opinions. This is the place where the personal opinions are expressed, and the job of a committee is to take the objective evidence given to it, weigh it up, and decide what it should report to this Assembly. This report does not do that, and I rejected large sections of it, and I have identified them specifically because of that.

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