Mr MATT KEAN (Hornsby) [4.48 p.m.]: I am delighted to talk to the Public Sector Employment and Management Amendment Bill 2012 because I fundamentally believe that we need an efficient and effective public sector workforce.
The bill proposes that the Public Sector Employment and Management Act 2002 be amended, in section 103A, to exclude the application of the unfair contracts provision in division 2 of part 9 of chapter 2 of the Industrial Relations Act from arrangements for dispensing with excess employees. The House should be very clear about the definition of "excess employees". The bill defines an "excess employee" as an excess public servant referred to in section 56 of the Act or any member of staff of a public sector agency who has been notified by the head of the agency that his or her position or work in the agency has been abolished or terminated, and that he or she is an excess or displaced employee.
Coming from the private sector, this does not seem to me to be the most outlandish proposal by the Government. If no work is available for an individual, why would we pay them to simply occupy a position? I am completely lost as to the reason for that. The public service is not the Labor patronage machine. Unlike when people are elected in the Labor caucus, public servants have to have skills and a job to do. You are not just filling a seat in the public service; you are there to serve the people of this great State of New South Wales. You are there to deliver better education, better health practices, better transport—better services right across the State. If people are being paid to do none of the above and their position is not required why would the position exist?
I think the use of the terms "displaced" and "excess" in the definition recognises that some public sector agencies have redundancy policies that use different terminology. Displaced employees are no different from excess employees. They are employees who have been notified that they no longer have a position or work in the agency. Labor Party members and their paymasters in the union movement jump up and down about the fact that these sinecures will no longer be available. This new Government is trying to create an efficient and effective public sector workforce that focuses on its purpose: to serve the people of New South Wales, to serve our community and to make sure that better health care, education, public transport and a whole range of other services are available. I note that the member for Cessnock is complicit through his silence here today. He agrees that this is a good provision.
I welcome the member for Cessnock supporting a more efficient and effective public sector workforce. I am glad that he agrees with the amendments to the Act and I thank him for his support. I draw members' attention to why the amendments to section 56 are required. It is clearly to support the Government's policy for management of excess employees. This is the policy that abolished the previous Government's longstanding practice of no forced redundancies, which allowed employees with no permanent position to drift in the system indefinitely. The previous Government let a situation arise where someone who had no job, who had no permanent position, was able to drift in the system indefinitely. We would not allow a member of this Parliament to drift in his or her position indefinitely. The community would not allow that to happen, and nor should it.
For 16 years employees with no permanent position drifted in the system. The community thought that was not good enough and was not acceptable. That is the standard that the community held the Labor Party to and it is the standard that the Labor Party should hold the public sector to. People should not be paid to fill a position if there is no position. They should be made accountable for their pay. That is what the bill seeks to do. New section 56 will allow departmental heads to terminate the services of excess employees who no longer have a position. A recent judgement of the New South Wales Industrial Court significantly broadened the test contained in section 56 that a departmental head must apply to establish that no "useful work" is available before terminating the service of an excess employee.
Previously the test for "useful work" had been limited to checking the availability of vacant permanent positions for redeployment. The new test proposed by the court requires checking of all work opportunities across the public sector, including temporary and contract employment, before an excess employee's services can be terminated. It is not realistic to expect departmental heads to search for any type of work—even short-term work—for excess employees across the public sector. In practice, this would make it virtually impossible for a departmental head to demonstrate that their obligations under section 56 had been met and for them to terminate the employment of an excess employee.
The former Government tried to build a huge bureaucracy that was completely unaccountable to the people of this State and this Parliament. The former Government was happy to waste taxpayers' dollars. It was happy not to use taxpayers' dollars for front-line services. The O'Farrell Government will put more money, more resources and more energy into ensuring that this State has the best teachers, nurses, healthcare professionals and the best workers in our public transport agencies in the Commonwealth. The O'Farrell Government is of the view that government departments must be able to manage their staff and implement organisational reforms in order to achieve more responsive and cost-effective service delivery to the people of this State.
I will always stand up for the public service. My grandfather was a public servant and my father and I are both public servants. I am proud of the contribution public servants make to this State. But when hard work, effort and innovation are not rewarded and only those who do nothing but collect their pay cheques are rewarded, the people of this State will be failed day in, day out—as they were under Labor. For the past 16 years people were not able to get to work on time, they had to pay exorbitant prices to use a failed public transport system and our health system was a debacle. I have read the Gonski report. During the administration of the former Labor Government our education standards slipped compared with those of other OECD countries. Why? Because Labor was not interested in getting the fundamentals right or in ensuring that the public service was focused on serving the public.
The member for Cessnock was complicit in this behaviour. In fact, he liked it so much that he thought he would join the same discredited organisation that let this rot happen. I see that my good friend the member for Strathfield is nodding in agreement. No longer will the people of New South Wales have to put up with a government willing to let people drift idly in the public service without being accountable. I am delighted to be part of a Government that is focused on the needs of the people of New South Wales.
I am delighted to be part of a Government that will make New South Wales number one again and improve opportunities for people across the State. The Government is putting in place Local Schools, Local Decisions, which is aimed at giving students the opportunity to meet their potential to ensure they will be the best they possibly can. I am delighted to be part of a Government that is implementing health reforms to ensure that resources and funding are directed to front-line services and a better quality of health care, not to those bureaucrats sitting in head offices at North Sydney, unaccountable and faceless to the community, who are not doing anything to improve the lives of the people of this State.
Last Monday I chaired the Joint Committee on the Office of the Valuer General, a committee to oversee the role and functions of the Valuer General in this State. What did the committee see? It saw that the New South Wales public service is out of control. It saw that the New South Wales public service is making decisions that will affect the livelihoods of residents across the State with no regard to any consequences flowing from those decisions. But the O'Farrell Government is prepared to make the public service accountable to the people of New South Wales and to the Parliament. That is what this bill and that committee are all about. The Government will ensure that the key performance indicators in this State are aligned to the interests of the people of this State to ensure better health care, education, public transport and so forth.
The member for Cessnock is also a member of the Joint Committee on the Office of the Valuer General. I thank him for taking a stand for the residents of New South Wales whose land is being ripped out from under them by an opaque, unclear and inequitable valuation system. The member for Port Macquarie is also a member of that committee and he also stood in support. The Government will continue to make the public service accountable and efficient. It will also ensure that money and resources will be pumped into front-line services to deliver better outcomes for the people of this State. As a member of the Liberal Party I am proud to stand up for those qualities, and I will always stand up for them. The Liberal Party is the party of opportunity. The Liberal Party believes in freedom of enterprise and all the great things that have made Australia the wonderful country it is.
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