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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 6 Hansard (2 September) . . Page.. 1788 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

work force to bargain for effective and decent wages and conditions. The way it is doing that, as Ms Tucker rightly points out, is through breaking up the ACT government service into smaller and smaller units. That, I think, is a completely unacceptable path to go down. Far from Ms Carnell's indications yesterday, through her statistics, that everyone is happy and everyone is secure, what we are seeing is a growing sense of unease and insecurity in the ACT government service.

Mr Speaker, along with my colleague Mr Berry, I dissented from the Estimates Committee report in relation to this matter. I note that Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne did not do so, but I hope they have the opportunity in this debate to reconsider the issue, although sometimes I wonder.

The issue of voluntary redundancies is an important one. The employees in the ACT government service work in a highly efficient sector. They work very hard. For the Government to make suggestions that they are going to put in place involuntary redundancies is, I think, quite unacceptable. As Ms Tucker said earlier, perhaps this was not a core promise from Kate Carnell's Liberals at the last election. Perhaps the commitment she made that the pain was over was not a core promise from the last election. Perhaps the commitment she made that there would be no involuntary redundancies and the clause in the triple R award would be maintained was not a core promise from the last election, because what we are seeing is this Government changing its mind.

This Government is starting to force upon the unions the requirement to accept that there may be involuntary redundancies. That process, as far as the Labor Party is concerned, is unacceptable, because it places an enormous threat over the head of every single ACT government employee - a threat that they may not have their job if they do not do what this Government wants. We have seen, increasingly in the past six months, a culture being fostered by this Government - the culture that you do exactly what the Minister wants. You give them the advice that they want or you soon end up not having a job. That is the threat, Mr Speaker. We only see coming through the Executive the advice that the Ministers want to hear. We do not have an impartial, effective, professional Public Service that feels it is able to provide the range of advices that it should on any particular issue. If the Government steps down this path of forcing involuntary redundancies into new enterprise bargaining arrangements, then those issues, too, will only become more acute, not less so.

I hope, in the course of this debate, that members of the crossbenches, notably the Osborne group who say they represent the interests of ordinary people in Canberra, will decide, if they truly represent the interests of ordinary people in Canberra, that the best way to achieve that is to make sure that there are no involuntary redundancies in arrangements between the ACT Government and the unions and the employees of the ACT government service.

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