Page 2910 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 13 August 2013
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Shared Services ICT, Shared Services Procurement, Shared Services Human Resources and Shared Services Finance. It is a new creation. Therefore it is hard to get a handle on movements in the staffing. It had 83 in 2012-13 and 1,038 in 2013-14. But, of course, that is because of all the movements in and out.
There are a number of issues covered in this portfolio. One of the interesting things that came up was the utilisation rates for office space and how the government is going about managing the office space that it has. It would be interesting to hear from the Treasurer where we are with the government office strategy. We, of course, had the aborted project to build the new government office building which, of course, then negated the need for a strategy, because most of the public servants ended up in the building next door to the Assembly. So there are still a number of issues there.
With Shared Services ICT, a lot of issues were discussed, particularly the fact that they are in the market for a data centre and the way they use the commonwealth panel of providers. They are benchmarking Shared Services’ costs against peer organisations. It is always a contention inside directorates; are they getting the best price they can by being forced to use the government’s ICT provider? I note that, I think, the Assembly perhaps has now moved away—no, they have not. No, the Assembly has moved away on personnel management and finance. But I do know that a lot of the departments have concerns about Shared Services ICT and about the way that they do have to use it.
I think the standout issue for me in this directorate was the whole issue of procurement. There are huge concerns over procurement in the ACT as it is being run by the government. Of course, a couple of years back we had that classic quote from the CEO of the Business Council who said that it was easier to do work with the defence department in Washington than it was to do it with the ACT government. I think particularly the cancellation of the Health Directorate’s project at Canberra Hospital really does give me cause for concern about the government’s commitment to process and how the government actually does plan long term.
You would think that when the government goes out for a tender it has the intention of actually carrying through with the tender. In particular, with the new buildings at the Canberra Hospital, several very large architectural firms here in the ACT made arrangements to get the sort of expertise they needed from firms in other cities and, indeed, some international expertise so that they could put together good tenders for this Health Directorate project. For those that do not know the story, it got to preferred tenderer stage. A great deal of additional work was done by the preferred tenderer. Then at the last minute the government cancelled the project. If you want confidence in the territory and if you want confidence in the government, this is not the way to get it.
The government has announced its new small business criteria in requests for tender, and that is good. We will see how that works. But if you are not going to follow through, people are going to question whether or not they should bother working with the government at all. I know that a couple of the firms that got to the end of this process had spent several hundreds of thousands, if not in excess of the million-dollar mark, on their tenders. Certainly, when you get to preferred tenderer status, you would
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