Page 1998 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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will be felt by some people as a reason for moving out. There is a sense that there will be more redundancies this year, and there might be more redundancies next year, and some of the departments are just recovering from redundancies last year. That destabilises all those things that are essential to a bureaucracy that works.
Those things include loyalty. Loyalty is a two-way thing: if people feel that managers are loyal to them, they will be loyal to managers. I have been talking to some people who take great pride in being the ones who give the bad news to their staff. But there are other departments and bureaucracies where there is a danger that people will receive bad news in an email, or already the rumours are going around and the destabilisation has commenced.
Another important quality is trust. For instance, people must believe that the contracts that they have signed will be honoured. That is at the formal level. There are also informal trust networks too: people know that others are not speaking about them behind their back, bullying in the workplace is cut short and structures are in place. Adaptive information—the whole question of institutional knowledge—is something that bureaucracies are losing over and over again.
There is too much of a tendency—I am not sure whether it is going to happen in this case—to call in consultants who have none of those things: loyalty, trust and adaptive information. They come in with their you-beaut MBA degrees and they tell the department how it should be reorganised and then they go away again. All that, of course, wastes time, takes energy, and erodes what I think the ACT public service has to rely upon, given that we have the big brother employer next door, which is the sense that people have that they are working in a body that cares about them, where they can see the impact of their work. That is the benefit of working in a small service: you actually have connection with the people to whom you deliver services. Of course that can be also a disadvantage in some cases.
As I said jokingly to one journalist last week, if we take away superannuation benefits and if we look as though we are constantly going to be restructuring, we have to hope that people work for the ACT public service just because they love it. That is what I wonder is being eroded. We know that the reorganisation will now take some months, and various other jobs will not get done. I am afraid that at the end of all this we might have lost some of our very best people. There is more stress when there are fewer employees, there is more work to be done, and perhaps it is easier over the other side of the hill.
Those are my concerns not about the bill so much but about what it presages. Nonetheless, I know that it is what governments do. I just think that the way that it is done is going to be of crucial importance.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (8.33): I want to talk to this government initiative, this proposal, against the background of the Emergency Services Authority and ACTION buses. I will deal with the Emergency Services Authority first and the detriment that is going to be caused by these near-sighted initiatives on the part of the government.
This administrative arrangements bill is taking the city back to the dark ages in emergency management. The government has spent millions of dollars setting up certain
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