Page 2432 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
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Legislative Assembly. It is unreasonable, it is a constraint of their trade, it is a constraint of my capacity as a member to do the best possible job I can with the limited resources I have. I cannot afford to employ a high-quality speech writer all the time. If I want to call upon somebody for that important speech or article, I cannot reasonably do it because I cannot reasonably ask someone to go out and buy a year’s worth of insurance which they will not use ever again.
These are the constraints; these are the things I raise regularly. Yes, I am sorry; it sounds like a litany of complaints, but we are paid by the people of the ACT to represent them and we are not given the resources by the Legislative Assembly to reasonably represent people. It is always constrained, there is always scrimping and saving, there is always someone saying, “I’m sorry, Mrs Dunne, we cannot do that. There isn’t the money for that.”
There are other ways of doing it. There are probably more flexible ways of doing it. I suspect we create cost by having cumbersome means of accounting for things. I would particularly draw attention to the cumbersome process of keeping attendance records for staff, especially senior staff. People who have been in senior positions and never filled in an attendance record for the last 10 or 15 years come into this place, still in a senior position, suddenly have to fill out attendance records. It is insulting, quite frankly.
Mr Mulcahy: You have to do that in a factory job in England.
MRS DUNNE: Yes. It is the case that you are essentially bundying on senior people. Quite frankly, if a Liberal member wants to employ somebody who turns out to be lazy and does not attend, why should the Labor Party be concerned about it? If the Liberal Party has underperforming staff, the Labor Party should be pleased.
Why are there people spending their time, their money and the resources of this Assembly keeping track on whether they work seven hours and 21 minutes a day and how much TOIL they have. Do not let me get onto overtime. The paltry allowance for overtime in this place is a joke. We had an arrangement whereby people were paid an allowance in lieu of overtime, which was modest but recognised how things stood. Under the new agreement the fact is that everyone has to apply for overtime. We do the paperwork in my office, it goes to corporate services and they do the paperwork there, et cetera.
For the amount of money involved it is far too onerous. It would be very much simpler and cheaper and would cost us less to administer the overtime budget in the Legislative Assembly if staff in offices were paid an allowance in lieu of overtime, as they are in every other parliament. In many ways it is demeaning for senior staff that they have to come cap in hand. They also tend to be a bit constrained about the amount of time they work. They know their member has only a very small overtime allowance and people tend to want to store it up for the big periods like estimates, budget time and times like this.
This is a big problem for the efficient administration of this Assembly. The Chief Minister and Mr Speaker need to take these important matters into account and come up with a way of better funding the Legislative Assembly in future.
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