Page 2662 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.32): The government predicts substantial savings as a result of creating the Shared Services Centre. It is to be hoped that combining expertise in this centre will lead to better procurement processes and avoid repeats of such events as the large cost overruns associated with implementing the CHRIS21 human resources system.
Creating the Shared Services Centre will mean that staff will be uprooted from their existing workplaces. Many transferring staff will have to make different arrangements for their transport and for getting their kids to school or childcare. Some of them will choose to move house, rather than spending more time commuting. I hope that the government has committed resources to make their transition to a new work environment as stress free as practicable as I know that the government is very concerned about the impact of stress-related conditions on employees.
I hope that the government will take up the estimates committee’s recommendation that the performance of the Shared Services Centre be reviewed after 12 months. Whilst that is not a very long time for the centre to have been operational, it should be long enough to give an indication of whether the projected savings are going to be realised and to identify potential problems with the shared services model.
Since the Shared Services Centre will be responsible for a large amount of government procurement, I hope that it will recruit and develop environmental expertise. It is important that the government develop comprehensive guidelines on sourcing environmentally friendly products and services wherever possible.
The ACT government is a large consumer of corporate products in the ACT and demand-driven initiatives which encourage environmentally responsible products and services are a good way for the government to send a market signal that minimising adverse environmental impacts is important. Ideally, where two or more competing products or services are roughly equally on cost, the environmental impacts of the entire product life cycle will become highly relevant factors for differentiating between them.
In some cases, choosing environmentally responsible products will result in direct financial savings over the long term, as landfill costs are minimised, water quality improves and adverse health impacts are reduced. In other cases, it will result in better outcomes for biodiversity, as demand for plantation-sourced timber products and recycled paper will slow the rate of destruction of our native forests.
The government has paid much lip-service to the benefits of triple bottom line accounting practices and the importance of minimising greenhouse gas emissions, but until it actually bases some concrete actions on the principles which underpin triple bottom line thinking, we will continue to see the continuation of business as usual. Business as usual is not going to address the environmental problems which we are bequeathing to our children and to most other species for which we have become the default custodians.
Knowing the problems that usually occur when IT services are centralised and corporate knowledge is lost from an organisation, I hope that the same tendencies are not about to be played out again in the human resources realm. I hope that some form of specialised
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