Page 2493 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 22 August 2006
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After all, last year, funding for community infrastructure was removed to pay for Groovin’ in Garema lunchtime entertainment. It makes me question this government’s priorities and wonder what secret recommendations the functional review made about the Chief Minister’s communications budget. Despite this enthusiastic expansion of the communications section, up to 500 public servants are to be lost in the Chief Minister’s Department.
I understand that big changes like this need to be worked through, but it is alarming that the Chief Minister was unable to advise the estimates committee in any detail from where those jobs would go. It does not appear to be from the executive level, however. The estimates committee was advised that there has been a growth of more than 30 per cent in senior executives across the ACT service. Indeed, keeping a track of employment numbers in general across government agencies has proved to be a challenge.
Comments in the estimates committee report go to the heart of the matter. I am quoting from 4.7 and 4.8:
4.7 Also of concern is the way in which staff movements are recorded in the Budget documents. Some units of the Government did not include staff numbers in the Budget document, making it almost impossible to reconcile the number of individuals employed by the ACT Public Service.
4.8. The Committee is concerned that this discrepancy and lack of clarity throws doubt on the Budget’s bottom line.
This reflects on the whole process of this budget, its secret report, its contested information, and the lack of scrutiny and detail.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Indigenous Affairs and Minister for the Arts) (5.44): I thank members for their contribution to the debate today. I want to take the opportunity to respond now to some of the positions that are being put by members in relation to the government’s commitment and priorities and to rebut the rather bland sweeping statements about the government lacking commitment to this and to that by pointing to the government’s determination through major structural change, reflected particularly in the Chief Minister’s Department and other departments, to ensure that we have an efficient structure that is best able to deliver the government’s priorities and to deliver, essentially, on its philosophy.
The sweeping statements that I have been listening to over the last hour or so in relation to things such as climate change, the environment and the Office of Sustainability and the government’s abandonment of all of the principles and all of the initiatives there are really, I guess, what one has come quite reasonably to expect in a wide-ranging budget debate, but the statements are enormously far from the truth. The Office of Sustainability retains its essential structure and functions. It has been transferred from the Chief Minister’s Department to the Department of the Territory and Municipal Services. That in no way denotes a change in commitment, a lack of leadership or a fracturing of our commitment to sustainability or the environment in any way whatsoever.
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