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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 2617 ..

MRS CARNELL (continuing):

To come back to the issue that we are debating - and that is both the Government's response, hopefully, and the committee's recommendations - the Government does not accept recommendation 1 of the committee. There is no rationale in the committee's report for restricting performance contracts to chief executives. The Government does not agree that performance contracts should be public documents in their entirety, although it does agree that sufficient information should be available to meet accountability requirements. That means that we believe strongly that the remuneration package, as determined by the Remuneration Tribunal, should be on the table, as it will be; but the performance requirements that are built into the contract between the Minister and the chief executive, and the chief executive and their senior officers, we do not believe should be public documents, although we have written into the legislation that a report on the performance against these contracts will be part of the annual report. That gives much more information than is currently available, either to this Assembly or, alternatively, to the people of Canberra.

Recommendation 1(b) is simply wrong. Section 29 of the Public Sector Management Act 1994 provides for ministerial responsibility by providing:

A Chief Executive ... shall, in relation to each administrative unit under his or her control -

(a) be responsible, under the relevant Minister, for its administration and its business ...

The Government's Bill does not propose to change this requirement. It does not plan to amend this provision in any way. So the reality is that recommendation 1(b), which says we have to "include a clear statement that the ultimate responsibility for policy, budget and agency performance rests with the relevant Minister", is right there in the Act. So recommendation 1(b) just shows that Ms Follett, who wrote at least a large amount of the committee's report, did not understand the Bill that she had passage of in the Assembly.

The Government agrees that executive contracts should set out clearly the grounds on which a contract may be terminated, but we do not agree that incompatibility should be removed as a ground for termination. One of the things that we have to accept is that in senior management jobs there is often a situation where two people simply cannot work together. That does not mean that people are chucked out on the scrap heap. It means that the terms of their contracts must be honoured. That means they have to be paid out if no reconciliation can be reached. I believe that is exactly the situation that exists now, except that now, under the requirements of the Act, people could be moved sideways. They would still be paid by the public, by the public purse, but they could be moved out of jobs and into a side room. I think it is much fairer and more sensible from the perspective of the community that there is a provision for those people to be paid out, to be paid a reasonable amount of money to terminate their contract so that they can get on with their jobs and community money can be protected. I think that is very appropriate. Interestingly, so do senior executives. It is as difficult to be working with a Minister, or with a senior manager, whom they cannot work with, as it is the other way round.

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