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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 981 ..

I have heard the justifications from Mr Walker and Mrs Carnell for the "new breed" of public servants; but I am not convinced, in light of the other attacks on the Public Service, particularly about competition policy, outsourcing and downsizing. None of these things, in themselves, are necessarily bad; but I believe that, in combination, they are dangerous, because they can lead to an unravelling of what is valuable in our system, without a real understanding of what is being lost. Social justice and the environment, I believe, could well be the casualties of this process.

When I looked at Hansard I noted that Mr Moore was concerned about how performance was evaluated. He talked a lot about performance indicators and so on. Since that time, from the estimates process and generally looking at how the Government has been producing its contracts and so on, we do not believe that there has been adequate attention paid to how you evaluate the performance, how you take into account in this system the externalities such as social justice and the environment. So, for consistency's sake and for all those reasons that I have just outlined, we are not willing to support this legislation.

MR MOORE (11.39): Mr Speaker, I rise to take a position consistent with the one I took when the original Public Sector Management Act went through in 1994, and that is to support this minor amendment. Mr Speaker, I think the previous speakers today were quite right, that it is consistent with the Public Sector Management Act. I can understand the position they are taking now, which I believe is precisely the same as the position they took then. Mr Speaker, I had considerable doubts about that legislation at the time it went through and determined that it was appropriate to allow this Government to use this process of governing - that it was going to be a quite different process from the way Labor conducted its government, but that it was still appropriate to give Mrs Carnell's Government the room to move and the room to do things the way it wanted to, unless I had a very good reason for opposing it.

I have heard the reasons put by Ms Tucker today. There are some good reasons amongst them. Indeed, they are similar reasons to those she put in 1995. At that stage I weighed those up and determined that the Government ought to be able to proceed with its Public Sector Management Bill. Indeed, that is the same approach that I take now. Mr Speaker, it seems to me that it is an inappropriate position to have somebody such as the head of CIT in a different set of arrangements from everybody else in the Public Service. So, there is an additional factor that comes into play here. I think that is the main driving reason for bringing this into line with the rest of the Public Service. That is why I will be supporting this legislation today.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.41): Mr Speaker, I rise to support the legislation which has been presented and to take issue with some of the comments made by members opposite and on the crossbenches. I think the first and overwhelmingly important reason for supporting this legislation is the reason Mr Moore has just given. You may oppose the structure of employment that has been provided for by the Government through the Public Sector Management Act. You may believe that that is a totally inappropriate way of running employment contracts for senior executives.

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