Page 3932 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 2011
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at the middle to lower management level, to have a very good idea about how decisions they take, responses they make in those very early days of a complaint, can impact on people as their grievance continues or remains unresolved.
I think leadership does come from the top. It has to be led by the Chief Minister and the Head of Service. The Head of Service needs to relay to all of his executives exactly what he expects from them as directors-general in terms of the standards they set within their own directorates. The directors-general will then rely on their executive team to flow that message down into individual work units.
I think there is room to improve in the ACT public service. I think that would be the same with any organisation and any workplace where people work together. But in a large workplace of 18,000, there is room to improve our systemic processes and we can do just that. We also need to train our staff to make sure that people, not just at the executive level but right down through the management chain, understand exactly what their responsibilities are and that their performance as managers will be measured against these. It will not just be about doing their job in terms of the outputs. It is actually doing their jobs as managers of teams of people.
There is considerable work underway. This is an issue I am spending a great deal of time on. I expect our systems to improve. That is not to say that there will not be cases and grievances across the ACT public service. There will be. But I do expect that the systems we have in place are the best, are the best practice, and that our staff that are implementing those systems are doing so fully trained, fully equipped and with a full understanding of what their responsibilities are. Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (3.46): It is a truism that there should be a positive culture within any workplace and, of course, within the ACT public service. What exactly a positive culture entails and how that could be defined might be problematic, but I think we would all agree that the service should be generally optimistic about their work, enthusiastic about new opportunities and eager to make a positive contribution to the community in whatever field or role they have within the public service. Group cultural practices and means for changing them are the subject of a very large amount of academic research, as is certainly a challenge of any large organisation, public or private, and is undoubtedly a considerable challenge that we should never pretend is going to be easy.
At the outset of my remarks I would like to reiterate the point I made in the debate last week on public interest disclosure—that is, that I think we need to be very careful about characterising the public service or tarring all public servants based on the poor conduct of relatively few employees. As a parliament, we delegate an enormous range of obligations and responsibilities to the executive and public servants. I think we should at the outset acknowledge the work they do. Of course, any organisation can improve and I think that there are pockets of the service where the prevailing culture and attitudes are not desirable and need to be addressed. We have spoken about these in some length here in recent debates.
This is a very interesting topic to raise at this point, after the government has been through a very large restructuring exercise. It is possibly the biggest change on paper that has happened since the advent of the ACT government, if only because we no
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