Govt accused of bad industrial relations

Press, 22 May 1986, Page 19

Govt accused of bad industrial relations

PA Rotorua The Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bolger, has accused the Government of bad industrial relations practice over its Public Service sector shake-up. Speaking during a break from the National Party caucus policy conference this week, Mr Bolger said the document released on Monday was virtually silent on the impact of the changes on the staff of the Public Service. “Either the Government does not know what will happen or it won’t tell its own employees what it expects to happen,” he said. He said that was unac-

ceptable — the position of public servants should have been spelt out and they should have been consulted on the proposed changes. Mr Bolger also said there were some strange quirks in the new policy. One of these was the reduction by $5O million in defence spending. Mr Bolger said this did not tally with the Government’s “stand alone” defence posture as it had earlier said that more would be spent on defence.

He also attacked the lack of accountability that Parliament would have over the Government’s new corporations, which

he described as quasimonopolies. “They won’t now be reporting direct to Parliament; the structure of accountability will be to boards,” he said.

Mr Bolger said the National Party’s objective was to decrease the size of the State. The exercise had not achieved any shrinkage in the role of the State — all it had done was rearrange the administrative structure of Government departments. Only their management had changed and as a result the burden of their funding would be transferred from the ratepayers to consumers.