Page 915 - Week 03 - Thursday, 10 March 2016
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change, and I want to categorically state again not only my support for this process but also the support of the ESA commissioner and the acting chief officer of ACTAS.
As I have said before in this place, achieving cultural change is difficult. There are still challenges to address. I am confident that there is a renewed desire amongst all stakeholders to both embrace and advance change. I want to thank all ACT Ambulance Service staff for their commitment and for approaching this process in such a positive manner.
Once again I am pleased to be able to reassure Canberrans that the government is committed to ensuring the necessary reforms are implemented in a timely fashion to ensure that ACTAS and each of our emergency services continue to deliver quality services to the community.
I present the following paper:
ACT Ambulance Service—Blueprint for Change Update—Ministerial statement, 10 March 2016.
I move:
That the Assembly take note of the paper.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (10.22): I thank the minister for the update. There are a lot of words in the update. We all acknowledge that the ACT Ambulance Service is one of Canberra’s vital assets. If you call the Ambulance Service, you want them there and you want them focused on the job, not on what is going on back in the office.
Unfortunately, despite all the minister’s words, all is not well in the ACT Ambulance Service. Indeed, all is not well in the ACT emergency services authority. It is because of the management of this portfolio by various ministers that this has been allowed to occur and continue. And it does continue.
Remember, members, that this report is being given today because of what the union described as the culture of toxic management inside the Ambulance Service. It is interesting that on the first anniversary of the delivery of the blueprint—the blueprint was delivered in March 2015—on one hand the minister says that cultural organisational change is challenging and takes time and yet within the body of the text he says that it is substantially complete. We have internal inconsistencies in the report. The question is: which is it? In fact, it is neither. The change is not occurring. We are going through a sham process.
We have this thing called the strategic reform agenda. It is neither strategic nor reform. If you talk to officers on the ground, as I do, all they see is a fattening of the higher levels of bureaucracy in the ESA, they believe to their detriment and to the distraction of the chief officer of each service and his or her deputies. The problem with this is that we do not have a genuine commitment to ESA.
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