Page 2661 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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for the proposed transition team being planned for the Shared Services Centre. With InTACT, one of the ACT government’s largest shared services providers, contractors appear to be being used to meet head count staffing limits. InTACT representatives have stated that it has 80 contractors currently engaged, which seems like an unusually high number to maintain at the expense of having these employees entitled to full-time benefits.
Dr Grimes also made the following statement in estimates regarding the likely staffing requirements of the new Shared Services Centre:
It is possible that we may need to draw on external expertise in the transition process. So we may need to rely on some consultants.
More costs. He went on to say:
I am not aware that any consultants have been engaged at this stage. The core of the transition team will be ACT government employees, but we may need some specialist advice around the integration of systems and so forth where we will be likely to draw on external consulting expertise.
Do we have any idea how much these external consultants are going to cost? Do we know how long these external consultants will need to be funded by the ACT taxpayer? These are questions that need to be honestly and directly answered because the answers could mean the difference between this endeavour coming in under budget or, at this stage the more likely scenario, the cost of it blowing out over time.
Mr Stanhope’s government needs to have a long, hard look at the completely unrealistic estimates it seems to be using to justify the Shared Services Centre. There are simply too many variables at this stage to allow us to be confident in the benefits of such a scheme as advertised and promoted by the territory government. The current amount flagged for appropriation in this budget is a figure that may need closer scrutiny and further justification to the taxpayer before we potentially go down a painful and costly path that yet again delivers little or no benefit to the territory.
Finally, we have had great mileage made about the workplace relations laws coming in and what villains the Australian government were in that everybody would be put out of their job and made into contractors and would lose all their benefits and so on. I understand that there are occasions in governments and business where a consultant is needed to come in and do a particular task, but when I see the younger people that are on rotation in this building providing InTACT services and know that there is an army of 80 of them out there who are all being told that we have got to make them contractors as they are specialists and I am quite sure that many of those young people would prefer to have the benefits of permanent and full-time employment in the ACT public service, I cannot help but be extremely sceptical of the information provided to my questions in estimates that this whole business of bringing in so many contractors in one agency is not all about avoiding locking them in to permanent employment.
Given that the Labor Party has made such an issue in the past about young people having some future and being able to take out loans because they want to be sure that their income is guaranteed down the track, I do find that the practice seems to sit rather uncomfortably with the philosophical view that has been espoused by members opposite.
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