Page 3215 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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Ms Le Couteur touched very briefly on recommendation 16. It says that the Eighth Assembly ought to do this, that and the other. I have had a difficulty—and I expressed it in the committee—about one Assembly giving advice to a successive Assembly. I think that is inappropriate, and I disown that particular recommendation. I do not disown it to the extent that I wanted to put in a dissenting report, but I did disown it enough to make my views known in the committee.
It needs to be expressed in this place that when you see a recommendation in a committee report which says, “The committee felt X, Y and Z,” it does not necessarily mean that everybody on that committee agreed with the recommendation. What it does say is that the body of the committee, by majority, will do that. To say that the committee by majority will agree on X, Y and Z is tautological, in my view. So I wanted to put on the record that I did not agree with asking the Eighth Assembly to do anything. It is up to the Eighth Assembly to do whatever they feel like. They can look backwards, they can look laterally or they can look forward. It is up to them. It is not up to us to tell them.
Furthermore, it presumes that this report will sit there and do nothing. If it sits there and does nothing, it was a waste of time in the first place, and I rested my case on that one.
I had difficulties with recommendations 12 and 13. An examination of the minutes will reveal that I was not happy with those. I want to address those quite specifically.
Recommendation 12 talks about the Health Directorate taking some action to work out whether or not there is a prevailing organisational culture at the Canberra Hospital and whether it contributed to the circumstances surrounding the alteration and misreporting of performance data. Madam Deputy Speaker, when I was sitting on the hospital executive during the reign of Senator Gary Humphries, then Gary Humphries MLA, Minister for Health, we were heavied—the hospital was heavied—from the Assembly to achieve. There is nothing unique about it. There is nothing unique about any directorate or department receiving some pressure from the political entity, the government of the day. There is nothing unique about it at all.
Every single SES officer in the ACT public service and the commonwealth knows what this pressure is about. You do not see them breaking, like the unfortunate Kate Jackson did. My heart goes out to Kate Jackson, but you do not see that. Those people will actually leave the environment that they do not like. I described to my colleagues the example of a colleague and a friend of mine who now lives interstate who actually resigned from an SES job and took an ASO6 because he did not want the pressure. That is what is available to people if they want to do it. There is no unique culture.
But there is a unique culture of bullying, shall we say, in my view, and this is quite a consistent one. It is from those opposite, Madam Deputy Speaker. They talk about a culture of bullying. We have heard it a lot from those opposite. I can tell you from my experience in this place that there have been some appalling examples of bullying. I can recall taking Jacqui Burke to task for the amount of bullying that she did over children’s welfare officers in the then department of disability, housing and
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