Page 2604 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
handled the finances of the territory over the last four or five years. If the Chief Minister did not have any idea of how big his public service was, how about his ministers? The same probably could be said of them.
I would think, in terms of the proper running of the territory, that one of the first things you would want to be abreast of, at least, as Chief Minister or, indeed, a minister would be how big your department was or how big, in the case of the Chief Minister, the general public service was. Indeed, that has caused some problems. One of the problems coming from it was the exponential rate of increase in the senior executive service, from fewer than 100 officers in 2001 to a high of 160, as we found out in the estimates process. I think the figure of 150 had been bandied about before that. I was trying to get a handle on that in the estimates meetings, as was Mr Smyth. We found out that as at 22 June 2006 there were 148 senior executives, still up from the 98 or 99 that there were in 2001.
The answers to questions about what the government is going to do to get the number down, what is going to happen now and how the government is going to overcome the situation were a bit vague. The answers indicated basically that there was every expectation that the number would drop in 2006-07, but the officials had no idea by how many. They did indicate that they had worked out a draft structure that would proceed, but were unable to say by exactly how many the number would drop. That is extraordinary. There has been basically a 50 per cent increase there and I think that therein lies part of the problem for the government.
I agree that there were certain areas where increases were necessary. Indeed, we would say that there is a need for more police. In terms of child protection workers and the kindergarten to year 2 initiative, which the current government extended to year 3, naturally you were going to get more people involved in the public service. But what of other areas? I have already mentioned and will not harp on whether, for example, so many are needed in the human rights area. Do you really need so many executives in some of the other departments? Health is being bandied about as having an excess to actual requirements. That is, I think, a very real problem for this government. If it looks at the exponential increase in the number of public servants it will see that therein lies the reason for the deficit.
That means that the government will have to make cutbacks, which brings me to the next lot of figures. The government indicated in this budget that some 500 positions would go. That will mean some redundancies. I am not quite sure if there are going to be people actually losing their jobs when they do not want to, but that is always a possibility. When you let the public service run away from you and you get this huge growth, some people are going to be affected. So ultimately it is not even fair to the public servants themselves.
The budget announcement was that 500 jobs would go in the public service. There seemed to be a bit more confusion there. There was a lot of discussion on this point, too, in the estimates process and it was indicated that only 318 positions would go. I am still not exactly sure if that is right or the figure of 500 is right. In fact, I think a figure of 499 was given as well. But it was indicated by the head of the Chief Minister’s Department that 318 positions would go.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .