Reform of ACT PS. Is anyone happy?

Fiona – salary, super, payroll tax, leave, real estate, infrastructure, $100k would be about right for the allup cost of a midrange clerk. Might be a bit more, might be a bit less. Still $10m is about 100 staff (might be 80, might be 120)

tallian, there were some subtle hints that the reshuffle and fiscal revamp were on the way. The most obvious of which was the move a month or so ago to a “common” ACT Government logo, and the removal of all departmental branding. The Government has a terrible poker face.

Heh, and we wanted to get work shirts with our widdle department’s logo on them, and what an uproar that causes when it got up to whoever it was it got to.

A bit of simple maths tells me the number of job reductions is going to be of the order of 100 ($10m divided by approx $100k per head).
?Where do you get the 100k per head from

Back to Health I go… hi ho!

Stop! Whinin.

tallian, there were some subtle hints that the reshuffle and fiscal revamp were on the way. The most obvious of which was the move a month or so ago to a “common” ACT Government logo, and the removal of all departmental branding. The Government has a terrible poker face.

Quinlan saw the writing on the wall ages ago and got out.

And now we’ve got the mayor in charge of the town treasury – the bloke who spent a motza on QC’s from Sydney and Melbourne to satisfy an ego trip to have his own bill of rights in the ACT. Not to mention the other crazy schemes.

This centralising of admin services sounds great in theory but will cost a fortune to set up and will be a nightmare of red tape and bureaucratic inefficiencies.

And don’t you public service kiddies worry about job losses. There’ll be plenty of new ones needed to set up and run the new white elephant.

I’d also add, how did the Govt fuck the budget up so quickly? Ministers and Treasury clearly did not have their eye on the ball – you don’t just go from everythings ok to shit we’re in a hole with no warning or time to do something about it.

A bit of simple maths tells me the number of job reductions is going to be of the order of 100 ($10m divided by approx $100k per head). Quite modest, and from my experience of working in ACT government, extremely achievable. The problem with shared services arrangements is that the service providers are remote from the people they provide service to, it becomes a paperwork processing factory, and the focus is on churning out transactions not providing services to actual people. Yes they’ll have service level agreements but these aren’t worth the paper they’re written on – what happens if service levels aren’t met – can departments sue Treasury for not providing the contracted services, can they walk away from the shared service centre?

The CPSU will be “whinging” on behalf of its members who now face the real liklihood of getting the bullet. The Union represents it members, if you think its surprising that they want to raise concerns on behalf of its members, I suggest you offer to swap your job – assuming it pays about the same with an ACT Public Servant who gets made redundant. Then all of your criticism will be meaningful. If the relevant union didn’t raise the relevant concerns it wouldn’t be doing its job would it.

As a ratepayer (well someday anyway) I want an efficient Government sector, I also want reasonable services. Now that would be a more useful debate to have.

Lets be honest Commonwealth/State duplication probably costs us all more, and as the ACT is a net tax exporter (we pay more income tax and GST than we get back) we probably will never be able to get a fair start with our hybrid local/state government.

All that said, looks like every state government seems to have got fiscally slack why the negative gearing/spruiking induced property boom was happening. Guess those chickens are coming home to roost.

This reshuffle is great news! We need less public servants and more bottleneck drive extensions, warp speed busways and big glasshouses with plants in ’em. Forget about decent health or education systems though, you can be born stupid, learn nothing, and die young.

Does anybody ever consider that there will be a genuine reduction in beauracrats or administrative buffoons clogging up valuable O2 by the combination of services ?

Really, somebody has got something to answer for if they believe that’s going to happen.

IMHO the only decent way of reducing the dead weight is to make it simpler to fire their non-work-productive asses.

But then again, they’ll probably need a management team, a HR specialist, an ongoing Psychiatrist, and a swag of other highly disposable income types to come up with the same solution.