Hague Kevin: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hague Kevin: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 29 November 2012. Volume:686;Page:6953. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I think I am probably one of the few members of this House who has been a State sector chief executive and as such has some direct—I am sorry Dr Prasad. Dr Prasad and I I am sure will have shared the experience of working under these various Acts that are being amended by the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill: the State Sector Act the Public Finance Act and the Crown Entities Act. As such I think I have probably got some interesting perspectives to make. 
One of the things that I would have observed from my experience as a chief executive in the State sector was that the sector was not well geared up to work together to facilitate a whole-of-Government response. Although we had very many I guess meetings across Government where we sat around and spoke about the problems and agreed that some joined-up response would be the appropriate way of responding to those problems sadly this very seldom came to pass because agencies were not well set up or not well instructed by Ministers to be able to collaborate across their traditional boundaries. 
From that point of view I am a person who welcomes any initiative to make the State sector work better as a whole and deliver on that whole-of-Government response. Very many of the issues that this Parliament wrestles with are ones that demand a more sophisticated response than the fragmented one that we all too often are able to deliver. 
Having said that and noting that that forms the central theme in the explanatory note of this bill—facilitating that whole-of-Government response—those are provisions that the Green Party could support. But we find ourselves in that dilemma that is often posed by Governments that have taken omnibus approaches to law reform where there are parts of the bill that are worth supporting but others that simply are not. Other colleagues have spoken about some of the deficiencies of this bill. I want to mention a few others. Certainly various members have spoken about the issue of making the boundaries around the State sector more porous and ill-defined to facilitate the privatisation of State services. That is one of the things that this bill will do if enacted. 
There is another function that is worthy of discussion and that is that this bill will facilitate Ministers appointing people into departments otherwise than on merit. What that is code for is appointing ministerial observers in departments. That is a development that runs counter to the central aim of the State Sector Act. The State Sector Act was about separating out functions and clarifying responsibilities. What this bill does in this part and in another that I will mention in a moment is it actually facilitates those boundaries becoming blurred. So that is another of the effects of this bill that the Green Party certainly opposes. 
But the one that I want to mention lastly is the effect of the bill to establish these departmental agencies within Government departments. What that will do is confuse the lines of funding accountability and performance accountability. So entities will receive their funding from one source but be accountable to another Minister. Again what that does is take lines that were separated by the State Sector Act and wrap them and tangle them up altogether. So the bill is good in parts but undermines in others the very tenets of the State Sector Act. We oppose it.