The decisive and secretive wholesale dismissal of the board and chief executive of the ACT TAB in the past two days does not sit well with the high ideals of the Government’s own Public Sector Management Bill.
One of those ideals was that all ACT public-sector employees would come under the Bill. The TAB had only been left out initially because of the Vitab inquiry. Another was that public sector employees would have certain protections, including due process before dismissal.
The chief executive of the TAB, Philip Neck, under the Government’s centralised new public-sector structure would have been the equivalent of a head of department. And under that structure the Government would not have been able to send him on his bike without a least a chance to put his case.
Legally speaking, the ACT Government did not have to live up to its own ideals. The power is there for the Minister to remove board members and the power is there for board members to appoint a new chief executive.
Morally speaking, the Government should have shown us all how splendid its new public-sector system would be by applying it in this case.
The second hypocritical element of the Government’s action is that it acted before the report of the Pearce inquiry has been made public.
The Government professes to be open and consultative. Yet it acts in a closed secretive way.
Without the Pearce report being public, it invites speculation as to why the Government did what it did. An immediate, though only fleeting, thought is that David Lamont hoped into a phone booth, changed into a Superman outfit and cured the ills of the TAB in the greater interests of Canberra City and the Australian way and that we should be eternally grateful for decisiveness.
More likely the Government is attempting to shaft home all of the blame of the Vitab fiasco on to the TAB chief executive and board, so it can say next Wednesday when it released the Pearce report: “”We have fixed this problem.” Its judicious leak of what it saw as the main conclusions of the Pearce report suggest that this is the strategy.
It is very likely that the Pearce report will condemn the TAB and sheet home most of the blame to it. The public evidence, at least, revealed some shortcomings.
But can we really believe that the Minister, Wayne Berry, his staff and the responsible department were utterly blameless? After all, this was the minister who wanted to reduce the TAB’s commercial independence and bring the TAB under the ministerial wing.
We are left with a TAB without a guaranteed link into a major TAB pool with another state, and in danger of losing perhaps five per cent of its turnover. We have a TAB faced with very steep competition from the privatised Victorian TAB which will offer interstate phone punters a better deal.
In all a fiasco that the Government cannot expiate by adding the sin of hypocrisy to the sin of incompetence.
Perhaps it was necessary for a clean slate to present to NSW to get a linking arrangement and perhaps someone with Roger Smeed’s record is the person to do it. But the Government should have released the Pearce report first. By not doing so, it invites a questioning of its motives.
If there is to be a Superman in this it will have to NSW Premier John Fahey who in the public interest will have to pull the ACT TAB out of the pooh with a NSW link when the existing Victorian arrangements expire in a few weeks time.