Page 2376 - Week 07 - Thursday, 4 August 2016
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We are not prepared to support this bill today. If we form government, we will seek to sit down with the public service, work with the union and make sure that the legislation is done in a collaborative, consultative way without cobbled together amendments. We will fix up what has become this belated attempt to bring in legislation that has been languishing for five years and then, right at the end of this term, being rushed through with amendments after really significant criticism from just about all sectors.
I believe that our public servants deserve better. We will work with them to make sure that an amendment to this act that affects their employment that it is important to get right is done. I am not confident that this bill, as presented with its amendments, achieves that act today.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.45): This is a significant bill for the ACT government in terms of the structure, composition and functioning of the ACT public service. Many of the changes in this bill relate to the new or relatively new structure of our public service, the structure put in place since the review of the ACT government undertaken by Allan Hawke. There has been quite a significant change in how our public service works since 1994 when the Public Sector Management Act was first enacted. There have been many changes to the legislation over the past two decades, but this is probably the most comprehensive overhaul in this time.
To people on the outside, the only noticeable changes would probably be that we now have directorates, not departments, and we have directors-general, not chief executives. But underlying this is quite a shift in structure, following the advice of the Hawke review. We have had a Head of Service in place and a system of directors-general having regular meetings with the Head of Service on a regular basis, that is, the government’s strategic board. We also have clusters, whereby directorates with overlapping or aligned areas work together closely to ensure that the government approaches issues with a whole-of-government perspective. These have already been put in place over recent years and that is not what this legislation is directly about. I am just giving the context to this bill, as it is certainly a pertinent part of the story.
This work on the bill itself has been underway for many years, and the first iteration of it was tabled by the previous Chief Minister at the end of 2014. However, I understand that key stakeholders were not satisfied with the level of consultation on the bill and that bill was not progressed. Instead, a further 18 months of consultation was undertaken to work through the areas—largely with the CPSU, as far as I understand—and this bill before us today is the result of that work. Thus I believe that this bill is a good balance of the needs of the ACT government: the need to have a very efficient and functional public sector, a fair amount of the good advice from the Hawke review, and the sanction of the people who will have to work under this legislation, largely represented through the CPSU.
This is a 149-page bill so it is not possible to talk about all the elements of it, but I would touch on what I believe are a couple of key areas of note. The bill embeds the ACT public sector code of conduct and applies the ACT public sector values across
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