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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 10 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 2792 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

This closed mind is quite astonishing, because I do not see it anywhere else. I do not see it in the Australian Public Service, where the very things that the Chief Minister is talking about putting into place in the ACT are already being practised. They are being practised in New South Wales; they are being practised in Queensland. Yet the Leader of the Opposition comes here and says, "No, we cannot have any of that. You cannot touch it with a barge pole, because some people might be upset by it". Whenever change occurs, some people are upset by it, because some people cannot handle change. I suspect that the Leader of the Opposition is one of them. She says, "If we did not do it like this last week and last year, then we cannot do it differently now". She feels uncomfortable when things are changing around her. I think the evidence of that is, in fact, the way she established the ACT public service, as I said before.

Ms Follett: Who signed the contracts?

MR KAINE: There was no review - - -

Ms Follett: Who signed them all up without even an interview?

MR SPEAKER: Order!

MR KAINE: There was no review of what the public service - - -

Ms Follett: You never even advertised the jobs. You just signed what was put in front of you.

MR SPEAKER: Order!

MR KAINE: Who was who it a few minutes ago said "no interjections", Mr Speaker? The Leader of the Opposition means no interjections only when she is speaking. She has two standards, just as she has one standard when she is Chief Minister and one standard when she is Leader of the Opposition.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Kaine has the floor.

MR KAINE: The public service that the former Chief Minister established made no changes whatsoever. There was not even a review of what the new public service was supposed to do. It was obviously assumed that whatever it had been doing for the last 20 years was what it would continue to do. There was no questioning about whether all of those functions were required. There was no questioning of whether perhaps the public service ought to be performing new functions that it had not performed before. Any organisation needs to be reviewed from time to time and redundant functions deleted; but not under the former Government. Obviously, if it had been doing it before, we had to continue doing it and we had to continue doing it in the same way. All we did was change the names and change the titles and get some new letterhead. That was my criticism at the time.

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