Mr McMULLAN (4:30 PM) —The opposition has already placed on the public record its position on these bills—the Public Service Bill 1997 [No. 2] , the Public Employment (Consequential and Transitional) Amendment Bill 1997 [No. 2] and the Parliamentary Service Bill 1997 [No. 2] —both in this chamber and in lengthy debates in the Senate. We regard the government's proposals as going far beyond simplification of a cumbersome 76-year-old piece of legislation.

Everybody agrees that the legislation needs to be reformed. In fact, it has been acknowledged even by the government that the process of reform was initiated by the previous government and that simplification is desirable. But we see these bills as, in fact, imposing radical changes on the Public Service, changes which will be to its detriment and to the detriment of the services it provides to governments and, more importantly, through them to the public.

Disproportionately, the Australians who are dependent on the services provided by government are the Australians in greatest need. It is they who are principally the con sumers and beneficiaries of the services supplied by government and the policies developed by government. To the extent that changes are to the detriment of those services, they are to the detriment of the interests of the Australians in greatest need whose interests we principally serve here.

The opposition believes the bills go too far in enhancing the powers of departmental secretaries and turning Public Service agencies into independent entities. They do not go far enough in protecting the independence and professionalism of the Public Service and the conditions of service of public servants. As an opposition, we sought to redress this imbalance by moving a large number of amendments to the bill. Many of these were successful in the Senate. We did not seek, as asserted by the Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service (Dr Kemp), to dismantle the bill, nor were we guilty of short-sighted obstruction. We made a genuine effort to preserve and protect those features of the Australian Public Service which have contributed to the high regard in which it is held at home and abroad.

In the event, with the success of a large number of our amendments, we believe we succeeded. Consequently, we supported the bill in the form in which it was amended by the Senate. It did not contain all the amendments which we sought, and it was not the bill we would have introduced if we were the government, but it was a bill sufficiently amended to meet our principal concerns and to preserve and protect those most fundamental features of the Australian Public Service while achieving the necessary efficiency changes. It was a bill which we felt we could support.

At that time, at the conclusion of the Senate debate, we publicly urged the government to resist the all too predictable knee-jerk reaction of outright rejection and to accept the Senate amendments in the constructive spirit in which they were made. But, of course, we need not have bothered. The knee-jerk reaction won out. I suspect, more than that, the political agenda of the government won out: the desire to have double dissolution triggers other than Wik to divert the focus of attention from the prospect of a double dissolution election on that bill, which all Australians know is a very undesirable outcome but which is one the government wants. The government is trying to put some veils between it and that outcome. This issue had three veils. It is now down to two. This is the dance of the four veils. We are now down to three.

What the minister said in his response to these amendments when they came back from the Senate was that the government rejects outright those amendments. That is very interesting. There were 50 Senate amendments, but nothing—not a comma, not a word, not a sub-part—in those 50 amendments was found acceptable by the government. Not one. It was not that they said, `We've gone through all these and we think 48 of them are wrong. Two of them have got something going for them.' It was 50 out of 50. The government said, `No, not one piece of this can we accept.' The government was never interested in even considering the amendments. I have some grave doubt whether the minister even read them.

They do not want negotiation. They certainly do not want compromise. It is confrontation which is in their political interest, but not in the national interest. They are also, I imagine, banking on keeping the bills in their original form if they are successful in their strategy and it results in them winning an election and being able to put these bills through in their undiluted ideological form following a double dissolution at a joint sitting. Therefore, for those two reasons, they have no desire for and no interest in compromise. Sadly, therefore, we find ourselves with a bill that ought not be at the centre of this sort of public confrontation between the parties; not that we do not have disagreements about the way the Public Service should operate and be administered—that is part of the democratic process.

The Public Service in this country serves governments of either political colour. Its structure and its administration are of concern to both opposition and government. It is one area where, if reforms are to be enduring, they must be acceptable to the opposition as well as to the government. Not that we expect this government to put in place exactly what we would wish—that is, of course, absurd; there is nothing in our political process likely to lead to that outcome—but it has got to be within the parameters of acceptability; and this bill is not.

The government will, of course, claim that it was open to compromise, and demonstrated this by accepting the recommendations of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts. I have to say that JCPA did improve the bill—there is no question about that. We have gone from having a bill that was absolutely dreadful to one with which we simply disagree. That is a substantial improvement. But the opposition made it clear, in joining the JCPA consensus in its report and in its recommendations, that we did not believe those recommendations went far enough towards remedying the defects in the government's proposals. We indicated at that time that we would go further in seeking to amend the bills in the Senate. While we did not achieve all the changes we sought, in the event we were able to support the bills in the form in which they were amended by the Senate.

In speaking in this debate on these bills—this is the second time we have dealt with these bills—I wish also to address the government's position, as made clear in this legislation and in the minister's public statements, that the government's industrial relations prescriptions for the private sector are equally appropriate in the public sector. I have to say that is not a view that I share. It is true that we should seek to have standards as similar as reasonably possible, but there are fundamental differences between the mode of operation and the motivation and the circumstances of the public sector and the private sector. These differences should not just be reflected in the industrial relations arrangements, but also in other parts of the arrangements for the employment, occupation and working conditions of people in the Public Service.

This concept that the Public Service should be subject to the same workplace arrangements as apply to the rest of the work force is dangerously simplistic. It is one of those ideological nostrums that you can develop in comfort in a university, but when you come out of it and into the government you need more calculation and consideration of the consequences of what you are doing.

If the minister actually believes that this bill—as he said in the second reading speech—`is all about making the Public Service more efficient and effective and delivering better service to both the Government and to the public', he would do well to ponder the words of Dr Michael Keating in his article in the November-December edition of the Australian Quarterly. Dr Keating is very critical of the government's policy that pay for all agencies funded by the budget should be linked to improvements achieved in the productive performance of each agency, and he is critical of its refusal to supplement any pay increases in the public sector by increased budget funding. He maintains this policy is flawed because of its failure to recognise the fundamental differences between the private and the public sectors. Some things have changed since December, but that general question of the failure to recognise the fundamental differences between the private and the public sectors remains the same.

Dr Keating is warning that the approach the government is taking `risks damaging morale and consequently performance, rather than enhancing it.' He maintains that the `policy the government is pursuing will over time destroy the public sector and will greatly reduce the value of the services they produce.' This is a warning from someone who was a senior public servant in this country, and a respected one who served governments of both political persuasions very well. He was appointed to be the head of a department by the previous Liberal government, continued in that capacity under the Labor government and for some time under this government. He is a distinguished Australian whose views on the public sector should be heeded. That does not necessarily mean he is the fount of all wisdom and that everything he says has to be agreed with, but I think the government really ought to give it serious consideration. He is warning that we are going down a dangerous path. And I think he is absolutely correct: we are going down a dangerous and worrying path.

Regrettably, however, this is the dangerous and worrying path down which the government is heading. Its so-called Public Service reforms do not portend greater efficiency and better services; they are in fact a serious threat to the nature of the public sector which has served our democracy so well. The Westminster system in its Australian adaptation depends for its success upon, amongst other things, a public service that is committed and respected by both sides of politics.

It is true that you cannot get a good public service, you do not get commitment, by passing a law. You get commitment because of the motivation of people who come to work for government. They make a decision that they want their career to be in the service of their community and that they are interested in matters of public policy and wish to contribute to enhancing the delivery of those public services to other Australians. It is that motivation which has delivered at the federal level—since Federation but certainly in my experience over the last 20 or so years—a high quality public service serving governments of different political persuasions extremely well.

If you change those arrangements to strengthen the power of ministers over heads of departments and strengthen the power of heads of departments over the individual men and women who work in those departments, you do start to create a framework in which some of those values and aspirations that led people into the Public Service come under threat and in which some of those long-cherished traditions of Australian public service cannot be delivered in the objective manner to which we have become accustomed and on which our political process depends. Regrettably, this is the direction in which the government is going, and the opposition will not be assisting the government along that path.

I have refrained from going over all the detail of things we dealt with in the original speeches on the second reading of this bill, which was not so long ago. I do not think we need to have a debate here as if all of that had never happened and therefore repeat all the arguments. In opposition, I suppose it is a bit more fun than it is in government, because you have more time to pursue those things and feel less pressure of time, but it does not enhance the quality of our public discourse to repeat all the things we have said before. So I will not go to what I think are the core elements of our concern in the detail set out in the second reading debate when we dealt with this bill last year. It was dealt with in more detail in the Senate, and my colleague Senator Faulkner will do that again in the Senate debate.

I simply make it clear that we will be opposing these bills at both the second and the third readings. We will not be reintroducing our amendments here. That would simply be a waste of the House's time. But in the Senate we will be moving all of those amendments which were agreed to by the Senate in November last year. We will accept the judgment of the Senate in relation to those that were unsuccessful. It would simply be an exercise in futility, having only recently debated these matters and found that the Senate was not prepared to support some of our other amendments, and it would be wasting the Senate's time to persist. So we will not do that, but we will persist with those amendments which were agreed to by the Senate in November last year.

If we are again successful with the amendments we put forward, we will support the bill because it would be the same bill we were prepared to support last year. We hope that the government might be prepared to accept the amendments in the interests of getting the reforms to the Public Service which they say they seek, many of which will be preserved in that amended bill. We hope that they can therefore accept that bill if it comes back. But we live in the political reality that we think there is no prospect that they will, because it does not suit the agenda that they are unfolding. If the government again chooses to reject those amendments outright, then so be it. The government will have lost a historic opportunity to ensure and achieve enduring reforms which preserve the best of our Public Service, which bring the Public Service Act 1922 up to date and which would leave us with an amended bill with broad bipartisan support—nobody's preferred model but a model acceptable to everybody.

That is what I think the Public Service legislation should be. We all argue for our preferred model; there would be something wrong if we did not. If we came in here and argued for something other than our preference, we would be letting down the people who sent us here. Matters such as Public Service legislation are not, in many ways, the most important ones we deal with but they are matters that affect the capacity for both sides of parliament to be able to work with the outcome because, sooner or later, we are both going to be in government on some occasions and in opposition on others. We need to be able to work with the Public Service arrangements that are put in place.

We have the opportunity for that if the government is prepared to accept the amendments that come out of the Senate, and they may not be the same as last time. We do not know, and I at least have not canvassed, the views of the minor parties as to whether they persist with the views they reflected last time. I was in the Senate long enough to know that one does not take that for granted. There was a time when I felt one could not take it for granted even from one day to the next, let alone from one year to the next. But, having left that chamber, I am sure my colleagues are better organised these days.

Nevertheless, we do not take for granted that all the amendments will be carried again. If a sufficiently substantial body of them are, then we can support the bill. We will be pleased to do so. We hope that we might achieve the government's support and therefore get a reformed Public Service Bill which we can all support which will be a model for a continuing non-partisan Public Service with a set of rules that governs it that have bipartisan support. That is what we seek. I regret to say that it is not what we expect.

Mr Lee —We have high hopes.

Mr McMULLAN —We have high hopes, high aspirations and low expectations. I reiterate that the government will be opposing this bill at the second and third readings in the House and seeking to amend it in the Senate.