The professional engineers union in ACT Electricity and Water is to step up its campaign this week against ACTEW coming under the ACT Government Service.
It is part of growing opposition to the structure of the proposed separate ACT service. The service is to start on July 1, if Federal and ACT legislation is passed in time. The plan is meeting resistance from unions, lawyers, the Opposition and Independents.
Government sources say that if the July 1 deadline is missed, it may be postponed a full year because of the Federal legislative program and the ACT election.
The president of the ACT branch of the Association of Professional Engineers, Scientists and Managers Australia, Col Miller, said yesterday that bringing ACTEW under the public service umbrella would prevent good enterprise bargaining and other efficiencies. Every management-workforce arrangement would be subject to “”precedent paranoia” because the Treasury would worry about its effect throughout the service.
He called for ACTEW to be an autonomous government business enterprise.
APESMA members who work in ACTEW would meet on Wednesday. It was possible some bans would be imposed, but that would be a matter for the meeting.
APESMA, as a professional organisation is very unlikely to impose any bans that would affect health, safety, customers or community infrastructure assets.
Also on Wednesday the chief executive of ACTEW, Dr Mike Sargeant, and the chairman, Peter Phillips, are to appear before the Assembly committee looking at the Government’s Public Sector Management Bill.
They are likely to favour ACTEW having separate status.
The Bill provides that all ACT public-sector employees come under the provisions of the Bill with a few minor exceptions and delays. The Bill lays down key employment guarantees and provides a procedure for management guidelines.
Mr Miller said ACTEW is coming under enormous competitive pressure. These pressures would result in greater customer expectation. If ACTEW came under public-service-type strictures it would not reform to meet the competition.
“”It will be inhibited by a centralised bureaucracy,” he said. “”The evolutionary process will.”
But eventually the pressure would build up and then drastic reform would have to take place, as witnessed in Victoria.
His union preferred orderly, gradual reform. It knew change was necessary and would prefer to take part in the change process with the employer.
“”APESMA’s goal is for ACTEW and other ACT government business enterprises to be thriving, efficient, effective, profitable enterprises,” he said.
That could not happen under the centralised process in the Public Sector Management Bill. That process might work well for core departments, but was inappropriate for government businesses which had to respond to different pressures in different ways and more quickly than core departments.
APESMA agreed with the objectives the Government had for ACTEW, but objected to the mechanism to achieve them.
The union has the support of the Trades and Labor Council.
The union has about 800 members, about 90 of them in ACTEW, those 90 comprising 95 per cent of ACTEW’s professional engineers.
The Minister for Urban Services, David Lamont, says the new arrangement “”is, to all intents and purposes, much the same as the old one”.
The Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Crispin, and the head of the ACT Legal Aid Office have also condemned the Bill, saying their offices require independence from government because very often the Government or its employees are on the other side of litigation they are conducting. They are supported by the Bar Association and the Law Society.
The only parts of the ACT public sector not part of the Bill are Totalcare (the corporatised service that does the hospital laundry), ACT TAB whose inclusion is being delayed pending the Vitab inquiry and the ACT Fire Service because it is a uniformed service with its own discipline regime.
The Public Sector Union is continuing its campaign against what it says are unacceptable transfer provisions between the ACT and Commonwealth services, mainly in the Commonwealth Bill. It and other unions will work on the Federal Opposition, Greens in the Senate.
The lawyers and engineers will be working on the ACT Opposition and Independents to get the ACT Bill changed.