Page 2666 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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staff from a number of different agencies, making a staff complement of approximately 900. They have said that they would be seeking to fill all of the new public service positions in that centre entirely from transfers. Some ministers said that and other ministers were not too clear about that, so there was some ambiguity during the estimates scrutiny of this particular operation.
Given that the members of the estimates committee were not provided with the report of the Costello review, we were unable to properly scrutinise the development of the Shared Services Centre and we are not comfortable with this proposal. If the Chief Minister is absolutely correct in this proposal and if we had seen the full details of the review, which might have indicated how the proposal was going to work, we might have been somewhat more comfortable. But we were not; therefore we must remain sceptical. One of the features of the proposed Shared Services Centre is that the management committee to administer the centre be composed of all departmental chief executive officers. That is something that we find particularly absurd. We believe that that concept will fail the test of time. I point out that the Follett government tried this concept in the early 1990s. That experiment failed. It was a costly failure, apart from the fact that it was not practical.
The emergency services authority will be required to hive off some of its administrative personnel to the centre. Again, that brings into question the operational independence of ESA headquarters. Apart from the fact that ESA headquarters now will move back in under the wings of a department, the Department of Justice and Community Safety, which will bring into question its ability to operate as an independent authority, the loss of key echelon staff will impact upon the independence of the commissioner to make operational priority decisions quickly. I am concerned that the loss of people to a centre will bring into question whether or not the ESA is able to continue to operate.
I was not convinced by the arguments of the Minister for the Territory and Municipal Services about the loss of staff from TAMS to shared services or whether he was quite happy that there would be a quid pro quo return of services to that department. The minister’s answers were far from clear on that issue. I am still not convinced as we stand here today on the edge of voting on this appropriation that the Shared Services Centre will not be created with other than a gross addition of new public service positions, with a very significant additional cost to the overall running of governance or that those extra expenditures and extra staffing positions would offset any currently perceived inefficiencies. That is why I cannot support at all the establishment of a Shared Services Centre. Again, it raises the question whether that particular model is going to fly.
Proposed expenditure agreed to.
Proposed expenditure—Part 1.9—Superannuation Unit, $107,000,000 (capital injection) and $17,280,000 (payments on behalf of the territory), totalling $124,280,000.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (4.52): Last Friday the ACT community was treated to the appalling spectacle of how the superannuation unit works. Last Friday the ACT Treasurer made the most extraordinary and disturbing comment about the territory’s superannuation assets. He said:
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