Page 2345 - Week 06 - Thursday, 10 May 2012
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These provisions include the establishment of the office and the requirements to be met on the appointment of the Clerk, leave of absence and a requirement to disclose interests, provision for the resignation of the Clerk, suspension and ending of the Clerk’s appointment and a retirement provision. It also provides for terms and conditions where such terms and conditions of employment are not provided for elsewhere.
Division 3.8 also provides for an acting Clerk, that the staff of the Secretariat must be employed under the Public Sector Management Act and that the Clerk has the powers of the head of service in relation to the appointment, engagement and employment of people.
The bill covers all the elements currently prescribed in the Public Sector Management Act in relation to the Clerk and the staff of the Secretariat, and importantly, in addition to this, it identifies specific functions that the Office of the Clerk is required to perform. This is not the case in the existing prescription in the Public Sector Management Act.
The bill appropriately places limits on the involvement of the executive in the affairs of the office of the Secretariat in a number of areas, including procurement, annual reporting and the role of the Commissioner for Public Administration in relation to the operations of the Office of the Legislative Assembly. This recognises that the staff in the Secretariat work in a different operating environment from staff in the broader public service who, generally speaking, serve the executive arm of government. These limitations will not diminish the accountable and transparent way that the Assembly staff perform their duties. Instead, they change the relationship of accountability to be one with the entire parliament rather than the executive. This is a more accurate articulation of the accountability relationship.
Recently I made a statement to the Assembly about the ACT integrity framework. In that statement I welcomed the findings made by Professor John Halligan of the ANZSOG Institute for Governance at the University of Canberra in his review of the ACT’s application of the Commonwealth (Latimer House) principles on the three branches of government that was tabled in the Assembly last year.
I want to reiterate part of what I said at the time—namely, that those principles embody accepted conventions of conduct in the relationship between the executive, the parliament and the judiciary. Professor Halligan has concluded that the three branches of government in the ACT perform strongly against the Latimer House principles and that the ACT system has many fine governance attributes which, in combination, make for a system unique in the Australian context.
I also indicated when I made that statement that we should not become complacent and that there was potential for improving the quality of governance in a number of aspects. I consider that this bill is another important step in continuing to establish robust arrangements for the governance of the territory. And what could be more central to this than the appropriate and separate establishment of the Office of the Legislative Assembly which this bill provides for?
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