Page 2088 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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there are positive risk management effects of transferring financial functions to the Shared Services Centre; however, this has not been the justification used by the government in establishing the centre.
On another matter, I was glad to hear in the estimates committee hearings that the Secretariat is examining payment arrangements in order to address the late payment of some Australia Post accounts. This problem did not go away after estimates. I understand from the Speaker’s explanation in estimates hearings that the issue has arisen because Australia Post requires payments within 14 days, whereas the Assembly has a policy of paying creditors within 30 days.
It might seem a trivial issue but I treat it as being fairly important because it does reflect adversely on members of the Assembly when they receive notices for late payment of bills. They are issues that ought not to arise in the parliament. It left me bewildered after—I guess it was a bit of an ill-advised snipe at the estimates hearing—I was obliquely taken to task for raising this issue. But a few weeks later, what do I get but a letter from Australia Post saying, “We are now cancelling your postal services because of your bad debt.” There was a bit of red-faced embarrassment in this place when I said, “You obviously haven’t fixed the system.” It was acknowledged that in fact they had not. Then discussions went on and there was some involved business about how Shared Services were not told to pay bills in 30 days. The head of Shared Services was embarrassed when I raised it at estimates and said that he would come back to me. I am still holding my breath waiting for the return visit. I have not heard any more from them.
Whilst people might get sensitive about these issues, I think members are entitled to be a bit sensitive too because we can get adverse credit ratings, especially in an election year. Two firms have raised with me the capacity of MLAs here to pay bills in terms of providing services for elections. I have been able to establish my bona fides, but I do not want situations like this arising in the future, and I know that other members in this place have been equally unhappy that those problems arose. If the government has an AAA credit rating and the Assembly is supported by that, we ought to be able to address such simple problems.
I also make mention of the library issue, which Mr Smyth touched on. There are a lot of strange things about this legislature. I know that parliament is driven by the fact that it is very small and we are a small jurisdiction and so on. I am probably the only person here who has worked in four legislatures in Australia. There are quite a number of things that stand out here that are different—and not different in the positive sense necessarily.
The library is just one example. I do not think that this library, which is a shared government and parliamentary library, is providing the level of usefulness that it ought to, and I think that is because of the way it is set up and the way it is resourced. You either have a proper parliamentary library, have it available to do research for members, have it appropriately resourced and have it under the control of the Speaker and, in a day-to-day sense, the Clerk or get rid of it altogether.
We have this sort of half-in, half-out approach at the moment with the library. We get an email saying they are going to be working late when we are sitting and so on. But
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