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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Friday, 14 May 2004) . . Page.. 2106 ..

The first set of amendments to the Act provides for transfer of chief executives and executives across the public service. While the current framework provides for contract variations, it does not provide specifically for lateral transfer arrangements. Under the proposed changes, Chief Executives can be transferred to at level or to lower level positions, while retaining their current remuneration for the term of their contract. This is appropriate given the small size of our Service and the limited number of jobs at this level. Executives can be transferred at level.

The Bill recognises the need for flexibility in the deployment of senior managers but it also ensures that any views the individual may have are appropriately taken into account in considering the transfer. This reflects arrangements that apply to other staff.

A second change provides for 3 months notice of nonrenewal of a long-term contract or for a payment in lieu of that notice. Under existing arrangements, most executives are not entitled to notice or any payment for nonrenewal. Long serving staff moving into executive positions forgo the benefits of tenure to take a 5 year contract. For these executives, no payment reflecting their long service, other than their accrued leave, is payable at contract expiry.

While the 3 month notice period is not as generous as arrangements for former senior executive service officers, who can receive up to a year's payment on nonrenewal, this change provides a sensible and reasonable entitlement for staff.

A consequential change to section 248 of the Act prevents these staff from accepting another ACT Public Service position during that 3 month period after the expiry of a non-renewed contract unless agreed by the Commissioner for Public Administration. This reflects an existing prohibition on re-engaging executives during the period covered by a redundancy payment.

The third main change to the Act provides for short term contract arrangements of up to 2 years. Currently, short term contracts cannot exceed 9 months. This means that the only way that key staff can be moved to a fixed term project or task of longer than 9 months is to provide long term contracts that override any other employment arrangement. This would mean, for example, that a senior officer taking a 12 month long term executive contract loses his or her substantive position. That is not a workable arrangement. The change therefore reflects the needs of the Service to better manage longer term fixed tasks and projects.

Existing merit arrangements are not diminished by this change. The Act does not mandate merit processes for engagements on short term chief executive or executive contracts (that is contracts up to 9 months). The new arrangements retain this, which means that merit processes are still required for any engagement for a period of longer than 9 months.

The fourth change to the Act provides for increases in remuneration through a contract variation where prescribed by the Public Sector Management Standards. This modifies an existing prohibition in the Act that contract variations cannot be used to increase executive pay.

This prohibition tightly maintains the current 12 point executive pay framework in which a job evaluation methodology sets job levels, which in turn link to Remuneration Tribunal determination of matching pay levels. However, this framework does not reflect the reality that executive jobs often increase in size and

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