Page 3297 - Week 10 - Thursday, 19 October 2006
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efficiency gains that will be delivered by slashing the executive staff of the commission by 40 per cent—that is by one commissioner and the position of president—similar so-called efficiency gains have not been demanded of all other government agencies; not that I am saying they should have been.
The overall budget of the commission, including the Children and Young People Commissioner, has been slashed from $784,000 to $384,000 in 2006-07, from $798,000 to $398,000 in 2007-08 and from $806,000 to $406,000 in 2008-09. That is a cut of 50 per cent to the whole commission by my reckoning. Deeds speak louder than words, minister. If overall public service expenditure had been slashed by 50 per cent, the electorate could take the government’s excuses at face value, but it was not and they cannot. It does not really matter whether the decision to slash the commission’s budget by 50 per cent was based on a conscious desire to avoid scrutiny; that is a political issue that the voters of the ACT will have to judge for themselves. The fact is that a reduction in scrutiny will be the result of this decision. Regardless of how it is packaged, a decision has been made that will limit the quantity of work that the commission will be able to perform. This decision will limit the ability of the commission to assist and advocate on behalf of the entire community.
But, of course, the greatest impact of these cuts will fall upon the most disadvantaged in our community. These are often the most politically and economically disempowered members of the community; their lack of political clout has been reflected in the disproportionate impact that they will suffer from this budget. I should say for the record that I am proud that the ACT government saw fit to institute these positions in the first place, and the opposition are on the record—and said it again today—as wanting to abolish the entire Human Rights Act.
One has to assume that these cuts were recommended by Michael Costello. This 50 per cent cut perhaps indicates the extent to which social justice has been rolled by the so-called economically rationalist focus of the Costello report. In his defence of these cuts, the minister said that the range of commissioners’ functions will be retained. While that may be true in a limited semantic sense, the number of commissioners will not be retained, the funding for the commissioners will not be retained, the secretariat resources will not be retained and the scope of their inquiries will not be retained, because the workload will more than double from what is set out in the legislation that this bill is amending. Finally, in reality the range of the commissioners’ functions will not be retained, because they will have only half the originally mandated time to address their respective functional ranges.
The minister says that by removing the president’s position every member of the commission will now be a specialist commissioner. Well, sort of: two of the three commissioners will actually be specialists in two disciplines; perhaps the minister could have called them generalist specialists. I understand that the positions of Children and Young People Commissioner and Disability and Community Services Commissioner are being combined. These are two very different fields and it is almost inconceivable that a commissioner will be found who has equal expertise in both areas. I wish the government luck in finding such a person; I hope such a person exists.
The first major change that this bill makes is to abolish the role of president. One other commissioner position has been abolished and the previously independent position of
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