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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 1 Hansard (14 February) . . Page.. 93 ..

  • MR OSBORNE
    • (continuing):

  • limited terms have produced some insecurity and uncertainty for departmental secretaries;

  • it could not be said that a secretary would not be unaffected by some speculation of future prospects;

  • employment conditions may increasingly emphasise short-term perspectives when providing advice;

  • in the last year of a contract the authority of a secretary could decline making him or her a lame duck compared with the authority of more permanent heads;

  • the introduction of fixed terms has made the pool of possible secretaries either think twice about the benefits of promotion or look much earlier at the prospects of private sector employment.

The South Australian Auditor then concluded:

No government can say with confidence that the absence of the security of, at least, the contractual term engagement free from the threat of removal without cause, is not a factor in influencing a chief executive in the performance of his functions.

The former New South Wales Auditor-General, Tony Harris, conducted similar performance audits in 1998 and wrote extensively in both 1998 and 1999 about the numerous problems that he found. Harris found, in part:

The NSW Government was one of the first in Australia to reform its senior ranks of the public service by placing them on contracts. The aim of the reform was to attract more skilled senior staff, especially those with private sector skills, and to reward them in a way which recognised the increased skills required and increased risks they face.

There are several inherent problems with the senior executive service reforms. Members of the senior executive service are now seen as the employees of the minister-rather than of the independent employer public service board-and ministers in their dealings with senior executives cannot always be relied upon to distinguish between management and political goals. If there was a danger before, it is now even more likely that the senior executive service would more closely identify with the political goals of the government of the day.

[The 1998 audit], the most extensive identified research into any senior executive service, found that:

  • political factors strongly influence advice of chief and senior executives;

  • these executives acknowledge the increasing shift towards public service politicisation;

  • [some] executives [have been] removed for reasons other than performance;

  • there is a conflict between the day-to-day dealings of these executives with their ministers and the government's formal code of conduct.

The most important recommendation made in the report of the performance audit was to separate ministers from their employer role by establishing a new, statutory employer for chief and senior executives which is independent of government .

In short then, both the South Australian and New South Wales Auditors-General have found ample evidence showing that fixed-term, performance-based contracts produced political appointments who were open to being strongly influenced by political factors

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