Page 2664 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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they following the folly of the ACT in the early 1990s when this was tried and it failed? Yes. Yet again the government here is saying, “Give us $23 million to put forward something that we hope will work. Let’s just all cross our fingers and feel good about it.”
The savings listed in this document are overly ambitious. My prediction, and I will be happy to be proved wrong, is that when the parliamentary accounts committee does a review of shared services in 12 months—I hope there will be a review; the government has been non-committal in its response, simply saying that the suggestion that there be such a review is noted—we will find that the savings have been overly ambitious and that the set-up costs have been underestimated. I suspect that to implement shared services in the corporate fashion that we already have in the ACT will require more staff than are required currently.
Of course, the current system was implemented by a previous Liberal government in 1995, in response to the failure of the previous shared services body. It did not work then and there is nothing to suggest that it will work now. We already use standard platforms across the ACT. They are possibly modified inside various arms of the government, but they are still using the same standard software that can communicate and work together.
The numbers, as with so much of the estimates process, strike me as incredibly rubbery. We do not even know where this organisation will be set up. When we consider the current squeeze in the outside rental market, any building that the government gets that is outside existing buildings will come at a premium. If it is inside an existing government building, it may indeed need a refurb. I think the set-up costs are tremendously underestimated.
It is interesting that we ignore the corporate model that we have. This strikes me as more like change for change’s sake, so that the Chief Minister can stand up and say, “I have set this up. Isn’t it wonderful?” But I do not think we been given enough detail to give any of us in this place, or indeed out in the community, the confidence that we would like that it will work to the degree that the government are suggesting. On top of that, there will be more savings because they are going to reduce staff and costs inside the departments as well. So what we are doing is cutting to the bone the core of good management inside the public service.
The Chief Minister has admitted that he was alarmed when he discovered that his public service had grown by 2,500 people. I am not sure that the new systems will give him any more information. I am not sure that the new systems will give him any more control or better management of his public service. Therefore, we really do have to ask why we are doing this. The basis for this change, of course, is that the government do not have a real plan to get themselves out of the trouble they have created through their economic mismanagement and ministerial ineptitude. So all we do is simply lift a model from Western Australia and apply it to the ACT.
It has not worked in WA and it will not work to the degree that the Chief Minister is stating in the ACT. The problem really is that the genesis of this idea is in the fabled functional review. Does the functional review really exist? We have a report that tells us what to do, but no-one in the community except the valued few who have seen it actually have been able to scrutinise it and question the underlying basis of the savings recommended by the functional review. Again, the fact that the government will not
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