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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 5 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 1444 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

is being held up for ideological reasons when in other States there are some flexibilities for a major industry such as the rice industry. For this reason the committee has recommended that the Chief Minister approach the Federal Government to raise the Assembly's concerns and seek to have the policy reviewed. The committee also recommends that the Belconnen pool be built.

Public servants and staffing became issues for the committee. In spite of commitments in agreements between the Chief Minister and agencies that full staffing profiles are to be provided, the committee was unable to get a complete set of profiles from all departments. Indeed it was said in some cases that that information could not be provided because it was an outputs budget, yet in other cases full profiles were provided. It was a ludicrous position for the Government to adopt. Their own departments shot holes in their proposal as a result.

Job insecurity is a major problem in Canberra for all public servants, a large sector of our work force, so the Chief Minister was given the opportunity to reiterate her election promise that there would be no more redundancies and that the provision for voluntary redundancies would be included in new enterprise bargaining agreements. The best we could get out of the Chief Minister was: "It is our preferred position. Voluntary redundancy is our preferred position". She would not commit to the clear election promise that she gave to the community. "It is our preferred position", the Chief Minister said over and over again, but she would not commit to the promise that she made before the election. What she meant was: "It is our preferred position for you to become redundant voluntarily, but if you do not volunteer it will be compulsory".

Mr Kaine: It is a bit like: "Joint ventures are not our preferred position".

MR BERRY: That is right. Unfortunately, we all recall the Chief Minister's statement: "The pain is over; the pain is over", but the budget and associated papers pointed to staff reductions and the Chief Minister refused to affirm her election promises in this respect.

A sleight of hand in the budget papers relates to the superannuation provision fund. The Government has made an issue of the need to increase provisioning for superannuation. In fact, it has created a great deal of hyperbole around the issue, as some sort of justification for cuts in other areas and the need to address the bottom line. But it also makes sure that it avoids drawing attention to the point that in its last term of government the Carnell Government decreased its efforts in this area.

It should, I suppose, be no surprise that most of the money identified for superannuation is not going back into the fund and this anomaly has been described as "leakage". When pressed, the Under Treasurer pointed us to an amount which was something like 50 per cent of the money taken off the agencies for superannuation leaks put back into the general budget for general provisioning. As I said, of the $80m identified as set aside for superannuation, $46m has leaked back into government coffers. When pressed again on what was a suitable percentage to be put aside for superannuation, the best that the Under Treasurer could come up with was: "Something less than 100 per cent".

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