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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 754 ..
MR HARGREAVES (continuing):
training and IT training. Imagine how successful he is going to be in the competitive marketplace. I do not reckon he is going to do all that well.
There have been a number of notable successes by the CAU and I wish to acknowledge those. There have been some notable failures also. I am not blaming the staff of the CAU for that because I know just how committed they are to doing the right thing by the people sent to them by other parts of the bureaucracy. However, I know of one case of a person who was a GSO, qualified roughly the same as these people in forestry. This was a very recent event.
This person was sent to the CAU and with the best will in the world they tried to give him this extra training, but he just could not take it in. What happened, Mr Speaker, was that there was nowhere else to go. He was a customer of the CAU for many months. It was not successful as an esteem building exercise. It did not work with this poor bloke, and I suspect the same thing will apply to those people getting it in the neck from forestry. What happened was that he was terminated from the service. He was no longer required, thank you very much, and he was paid out. He was paid out for less than $20,000. He has no tertiary qualifications, Mr Speaker, and he has nothing to sell in the marketplace.
We do not have a forestry industry like New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland or Tasmania. We have an ever-shrinking public sector horticultural service, with not much measure of success, I have to say. If we look at the success of the private contractor now servicing the Woden/Weston area, I am quite frightened when I think that that very same firm might be trying to provide the services in the Tuggeranong region, Mr Speaker, because right now, due to the government's cutbacks and shifting priorities, like the shifting sands in the desert, the services in Tuggeranong as well are pretty ordinary.
Mr Speaker, we need to support this motion. We do not need to go along with this amendment. It is not needed. What is meant by the words "without the approval of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission"? That means we have to find a way to abrogate responsibility, to shift it onto somebody else. I wonder how long the Australian Industrial Relations Commission will exist under Mr Smyth's mentor, Mr Reith? I really do not think it has much of a life unless the tsunami takes care of Mr Reith come the end of the year.
This government ought to accept and honour the undertaking given by the former Chief Minister when it comes to redundant employees in the ACT. I was a member of that public service at the time. In fact, Mr Speaker, I was sitting in the transit lounge at the time with my bags packed. The senior bureaucrats of the time were sharpening knives all around. The only little ray of comfort that I had was that both Rosemary Follett and Kate Carnell had given an undertaking, their personal word, that nobody would be compulsorily retired from the public service.
Mr Humphries: But they were, under your government.
MR
HARGREAVES: I just told you, Chief Minister, the details of a man who is in poverty at the moment, and your government just saw him go. I think the Chief Minister is being hypocritical in the extreme with that one. He is just trying to run the odd red herring. It is just silly. All I am getting out of this, Mr Speaker, is that this Chief Minister
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