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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 3 Hansard (26 March) . . Page.. 605 ..

Debate resumed from 22 June 1995, on motion by Mrs Carnell:

That the Assembly takes note of the papers.

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (11.07), in reply: Mr Speaker, I tabled the workforce statistical reports quite a while ago now. Overall in 1994-95 there had been just a small variation in the size of the ACT public service work force, I think, from 20,472 employees in the first quarter to 20,690 in the fourth quarter. As all those here would know, that tends to happen between various quarters. Certainly, there was not any of the downturn in numbers that I suspect we need in the longer term. I will be tabling the 1995-96 workforce statistical reports on a six-monthly basis. These reports will provide information at both a program level and a subprogram level. I am very confident that the new figures are comparable with those for previous years. We have always had a bit of a problem in making sure that our statistics are comparable with past years. Splitting up on a program and subprogram basis will give us an opportunity to see what is happening in the ACT government work force this year and in years to come.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Debate resumed from 21 February 1996, on motion by Mrs Carnell:

That the Assembly takes note of the paper.

MR WHITECROSS (Leader of the Opposition) (11.08): Mr Speaker, perhaps the less said about this paper the better. This paper is an exercise in mopping up some fairly outrageous and ill-informed debate that Mrs Carnell tried to stimulate before the election about how the world would be a different place if we had so-called council-style government. No-one could ever get out of Mrs Carnell anything about exactly what council-style government was. She commissioned this group to go away and look at council-style government. The paper itself in no way illuminates the question of what council-style government is; no doubt, the panel that Mrs Carnell appointed was as baffled as the rest of us as to what exactly Mrs Carnell meant by that. But it was a necessary thing to get this out of the way.

It is interesting to note that most of the recommendations of this report do not deal with council-style government or making the processes of government more open and consultative or anything else; they deal with how to streamline executive government. They deal with things such as the rearrangement of ministerial portfolios, administrative arrangements, and getting a couple of senior bureaucrats into Cabinet to help them out in the Cabinet processes. Most of the recommendations in the report deal in no sense with

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