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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (5 December) . . Page.. 2621 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

That brings me to one issue in particular where I believe the briefing and the Government's own documents were invaluable. If we look at the Government's response we can see that the Government does disagree with the committee's analysis at paragraphs 5.19 to 5.21, 6.4 and 6.6. Mr Speaker, this relates to the question of whether SES officers have to resign on taking up a contract. The Government is simply wrong in relation to the question of resignation. I am not sure whether this represents a lack of understanding on their part, or their advisers' part, or an attempt at deception. Whatever the reason, they are wrong. They appear not to understand the effects of their own legislation, and I take that very seriously.

Mr Speaker, the fact of the matter is that officers who are offered contracts will not have to actually write down, "I, Johanna Bloggs, hereby resign from the SES."; but the only reason they will not have to do that is that the effect of signing an executive contract achieves precisely that objective. They do not even have the dignity, if you like, of writing it down; it just happens. It is this very legislation that sets that out. In the Government's policy outline, the first briefing document that they circulated - it went to all MLAs on 5 October - the Government said this:

By accepting the offer of an Executive contract, staff will be "deemed" to have forgone their status as a permanent officer.

In other words, they have resigned from the SES. It continued:

In accepting the offer of an Executive contract it is not necessary for existing staff to formally resign from the service.

It is not necessary because they have already been deemed to have done it. There is no doubt whatsoever that that is the intention of the legislation. At the briefing by officials that I referred to earlier, a question was put to those officials, the technical experts - and I thank them for their time and for their very full briefing - in relation to that second sentence. The question was, "But the acceptance of the offer of a contract will effectively achieve that," - that is, resignation - "will it not?". The answer given was, "Yes". That is all. Not "Maybe", or not, "We do not think so", or not, "Well, that is not what Mrs Carnell thinks". The answer was, "Yes". I think that is pretty clear, Mr Speaker.

Further, the explanatory memorandum to the Bill, on clause 59, if members have read that, says this:

The effect of new paragraph (2)(za) is to enable the Commissioner to make Standards with respect to the payment of accumulated recreation and long service leave entitlements to officers accepting an executive contract. These entitlements would usually be payable only on termination of employment. The purpose of this provision is to provide for the "cashing out" of accrued leave.

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