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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 2 Hansard (25 February) . . Page.. 377 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

Clause 5 of the Bill, which seeks to amend section 9 of the principal Act, deals with the general obligations of public employees. What the Government seeks to do in relation to this matter is to add to the wide-ranging general obligations of public employees which are dealt with in the principal Act. I will not go into all of them, but they cover the broad range of activities that a public employee would be faced with in the course of their duties. They are comprehensive. There is no doubt about that. They are absolutely comprehensive. Mr Speaker, the Government is attempting to widen - - -

Mr Humphries: Destroy the workers?

MR BERRY: Indeed, in some ways. Mr Speaker, Mr Humphries interjects flippantly, "Destroy the workers?". Indeed, it does offer unscrupulous governments the opportunity to place an unfair burden on employees.

Mr Humphries: And, of course, we are one of those, aren't we, Wayne?

MR BERRY: Mr Humphries interjects correctly, "And we are one of those". I think he was asking a rhetorical question, but I would say yes.

Mr Speaker, I refer to a matter which was dealt with, I think, in the last week of sitting and which raised the issue of fear and intimidation in the public sector work force which can arise from a contract situation. I think the general obligations of public employees, which the Government seeks to extend, are unreasonable. Mrs Carnell, in her presentation speech, referred to the introduction of the Public Sector Management Act and said this:

The rationale at the time was that the Government as an employer was not interested in the private lives of its employees and disciplinary action should properly be confined to things done in the performance of an employee's duty.

Those are quite proper statements. She continued:

As a result, the Public Sector Management Act 1994 deliberately did not carry over the previous disciplinary offence of "improper conduct otherwise than as an officer" ...

Neither should it have done, Mr Speaker, because an element of double jeopardy arises when these sorts of provisions are included in an Act. When you look at the extension of the obligations which is proposed by the Government in the context of the recent debate which has occurred, for example, over the discharging or the sacking of Jacqui Rees from the Interim Kingston Foreshore Development Authority, we get an entirely different picture about what could occur with the extension of these general obligations. In her speech Mrs Carnell said this:

However, a number of cases have arisen that have highlighted the difficulty of drawing a clear line between work-related matters and the private lives of public employees.

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