Page 2811 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
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and members of governing boards, for providing their time, cooperation and expertise in the course of the Assembly process and, as I mentioned earlier, the Committee Office.
I commend the report to the Assembly. My committee colleagues may also wish to make some comment.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (11.19): I think the chair of the committee has covered the broad thrust of the report. I just want to bring to the attention of members a number of the recommendations.
Recommendation 4 is a very important recommendation. The committee recommends that the ACT government give consideration to establishing a central team within the ACT public service to develop and provide expertise in dealing with bullying matters.
What a sad state of affairs the ACT public service and the administration by this government must be in when a committee of the Assembly recommends that it actually get expertise to counter what can only be seen as a plague of bullying in the ACT public service; we now have reports of so many incidents of bullying across so many departments. We have seen it in the 10-year war in obstetrics. We have seen it now in the CIT, where there are a number of reports largely ignored by the government and by various ministers. We have seen it in the Ambulance Service. We have seen it in TAMS. We have seen it in so many areas now. We see particularly the bullying of students by other students in our school system.
I believe this recommendation is very important, and this is an issue that I think the government have not paid enough attention to. They are more concerned about protecting their reputation than about ensuring that people who come to work are able to work in a bully-free environment and that where they are bullied and they bring it to the attention of the authorities, those above them, there is no retribution. Largely the government have simply ignored the issue en masse, and that is a shame.
Our report noted, for instance, that the reports of bullying had risen from 39 in 2009 to 62 in 2010. That is a 50 per cent increase in the reporting of bullying. We all know that a large amount of bullying goes unreported; people either choose to move on or simply to put up with it, because of the retribution that they fear. So recommendation 4 is very important and the government should take it seriously and act on it immediately.
Oddly enough, the report was drafted before the headline in the Canberra Times this morning talking about asbestos. Recommendation 5 of the committee recommends that the government should examine the feasibility of establishing a centralised government-run asbestos register and recommendation 6 is that the ACT government examine the feasibility of establishing a public register of all buildings, structures and sites in the ACT which contain asbestos.
I do not believe we have yet got to the bottom of the issue of where the asbestos is and how much there is out there. I noted in some of the discussion this morning that the old “buyer beware” attitude was taken: “Well, you’ve got it; now it’s your problem.”
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