On one hand, the former Treasurer, John Dawkins, told and Advance Bank Trends lunch that the transition to self-government in the ACT “”had been handled with aplomb”. On the other hand, the March edition of the Trends magazine itself (launched at the lunch) pointed to several areas of public spending in the ACT which were higher and less efficient than state counterparts. It said “”There is little evidence of any substantial progress in using the opportunity afforded by the separation [from the Commonwealth Public Service] to increase the productivity of the ACT public service.”
The Advance Bank is to be commended to its commitment to the free flow of ideas and comment, but the conflicting messages leave the average ACT voter somewhat confused.
Mr Dawkins said that some members of the Hawke Government were opposed to ACT self-government because they thought the ACT would never make the required decisive cuts to government spending. But he had thought the discipline could be imposed on the ACT to reduce spending without disruption to the delivery of services and that the ACT had done it with aplomb.
Trends, however, said improving efficiency of the ACT public sector should be a top priority for the ACT Government. Presumably the Trends authors thought Mr Dawkins’s “”aplomb” could be improved upon.
Trends is noted for the rigour of its economic analysis and the solidness of the data it bases it upon. Mr Dawkins, on the other hand, has had his mind on the big Federal picture and has had family commitments in the West which, quite reasonably, have taken him there (while in office and out of it) for as much time as he could get. In short, the Dawkins view is a very generous one _ generous to the point of inaccuracy.
However, on the wider issue of public administration, he made some pertinent points. He called for the preservation of appointment on merit, more open advertising of positions and greater transferability between all public services.
The last point is an important one for the ACT. The new ACT service will have a large talent pool of Commonwealth public servants who could move between services without having to move house and family. The ACT Government has gone to some pains to ensure that the physical ease of transferability will not be eroded by erecting unnecessary bureaucratic barriers to transfers in and out.
Ensuring transferability, however, does not mean that conditions have to be identical or that the ACT has to embrace expensive and inefficient practices in the Commonwealth service, particularly some of the more cumbersome aspects of its occupational-health-and-safety, equal-opportunity and merit-protection laws and procedures.