Page 2914 - Week 09 - Thursday, 13 August 2015
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The recent Treasury Review also did not propose any improvements to support areas that clearly duplicated what occurred elsewhere and/or were able to be outsourced thereby providing efficiencies and improved services. The creation of three Executive positions to oversee support services cannot be supported in relation to improved efficiencies and effectiveness; and will not improve emergency services to the people of the ACT.
There is the official position of the professionals: this minister’s strategic reform agenda will not improve emergency services to the people of the ACT. You have to ask: what is the purpose of the reform agenda? Mr Corbell must have been laughing all the way to the AAs when the new Chief Minister announced the changes and he did not have police and emergency services anymore, because there are a number of views that have come home.
Give Ms Burch as minister the benefit of the doubt. She was not there for most of the problems and she had an opportunity to make real change; not just window dressing—not just a nice, glossy letterhead with “Strategic reform agenda”, but actually say, “Okay, what’s at the heart of these problems? How do we fix these problems?” Surely the review was to improve emergency services to the people of the ACT. Clearly, on behalf of the fire service, most of their members do not see that that is occurring. I know, talking to volunteers in the RFS and the SES, that they do not see that it is happening.
I have spoken to a lot of people in the ambulance service. You have a system where senior ambulance officers, some with 20 years experience, are suspended and left on suspension pending disciplinary hearings for, in one case, 75 weeks. What sort of system are you running where somebody is left hanging for 75 weeks to find out their fate? Justice delayed is justice denied. We have a system run by the management that lets good officers who may or may not have made a mistake—I do not seek to judge what they were disciplined for—be sidelined for 75 weeks. No-one deserves that.
We all know why it happens that way—because that is how you deal with it. You just make life so intolerable for people that they quit, they take some second-rate offer, they move aside or they go and find another job. But there have been a number of cases in the ACT Ambulance Service where very senior, very skilful officers, very well regarded officers, have been left languishing pending disciplinary action. How do you leave somebody out in the cold for a year or 75 weeks? That is poor management, and that has happened. Some of that has happened on this minister’s watch, and there is nothing in the strategic reform agenda that says they will fix those sorts of problems. That is what is wrong with this agenda.
The agenda is a joke. The ESA is not an overly large organisation, but to set up three further executive positions and then say, “We’re going to staff those executive positions by taking the deputy officers away from their operational and support functions inside their services and put them into executive people and culture, executive risk and planning and executive logistics and governance to support the commissioner,” is a joke. It is simply a joke. It should stop, and the minister should intervene.
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