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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (6 May) . . Page.. 982 ..

I note that, increasingly, governments all over this country and, indeed, all over the world, including Labor governments, are using this device. Nonetheless, the ideologues opposite do not believe in following the trends of the rest of the world, except in certain places. We will not go into that. But that is your ideology. You can have that, if you wish. I will put that to one side.

The fact is that we now have in the ACT a public service which is based on performance-based contracts. Virtually every senior officer in the government service has that kind of contract, except for one - the director of the Canberra Institute of Technology. Imagine that there is a future change of government and that legislation is wound back in the rest of the Public Service to go back to the old public sector conditions kind of employment that was provided for senior officers. When you came up to tidy up the little bit left over with the Canberra Institute of Technology, I am certain that you would run the argument: At least we should have all the executives in the one boat. They should all be doing it on the same basis.

It is quite unfair to discriminate between different employees based on the numbers on the floor of the Legislative Assembly on the day. We should not be saying, "We had the numbers on this particular day, so we got through these contracts for these particular public servants, but on another day we might not have had the numbers". Who knows, Mr Osborne might not come down today. The legislation might fail. We end up then with one set of conditions for one officer in the Public Service and other sets of conditions for other officers. I hope that members opposite can sit there and see how inequitable that would be. On related matters, like pay and conditions, public holidays, whatever it might be, members opposite have argued for consistency. I would say to them today, "If you believe in consistency, support this Bill".

Mr Speaker, I would also like, as a matter of principle, to take up the challenge put down by Mr Berry and Ms Tucker and argue that performance-based contracts really are a much better way of providing for service to the people of Canberra and justification for the very considerable amounts of money which are paid to such officers as part of their salary package. Mr Speaker, I have to confess that I do not see much of a link with the gap between rich and poor and social justice and the environment, necessarily, on the face of it, through using this device rather than any other device to pay and to employ senior executives in the government service. I will have to study Ms Tucker's speech a bit more closely to determine what the link is between those things. But, Mr Speaker, I will say that I think that, if you look at the old system and you study it, you see how very inadequate it was for dealing with these issues.

Let us suppose that we have a director of the Canberra Institute of Technology who does not misbehave - he or she does not do something grossly inappropriate to his or her office - who is physically capable of getting in to work each day and turning over the paperwork, who is sound of mind, who is not bankrupt, who does not absent himself or herself from duty for unacceptable periods of time, who does not get imprisoned for any period of time, but who, notwithstanding all of those things, is a complete and utter dud and is not doing the job that he or she ought to do in the position of director of the Canberra Institute of Technology. Should such a person remain in that position? Mr Speaker, clearly, he or she should not.

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